Disqus - Latest Comments for solobasssteve

Re: Bass Player Doug Lunn Has Passed Away After Long Battle With Cancer

solobasssteve — Tue, 14 Feb 2017 16:26:00 -0000

such sad news. An incredible musician and amazing human.

Re: The hounding of Baskerville

solobasssteve — Sun, 14 Nov 2010 04:24:08 -0000

Wow, the Indie picks up on a piece of crass cyber-bullying by one of country's most disreputable columnists (Letts) in the Mail, and instead of seeing the insanity of attacking an individual over personal comments on an expressly personal twitter account, piles in and pours petrol on the bonfire.

Matt Chorley, I hope you're pleased with yourself. If I was getting paid a few quid for rubbishing someone's career by following Quentin Letts' lead, I'd be pretty ashamed to call myself a 'journalist'.

Meanwhile, people are being human on twitter. Talking, sharing, laughing, joking... what a shock! Sack them all, especially the ones who care about their jobs enough to voice protest when the good they do is threatened by a government hell-bent on ruining the public services that have underpinned british life for so long.

Your headline sums it up - it's hounding. You want to do a 'report' on twitter usage by public servants? Great, how about doing some research, instead of this playground petulance. There are LOADS of civil servants on Twitter, humanizing the behind-the-scenes processes that make this country work. I for one feel more connected to and grateful for the work of the civil service thanks to Baskers and all the other civil service, government and parliament twitterers that I follow. Your imbalanced, clumsily researched hatchet job threatens that. For the sake of you collecting some crumbs falling from the Mail's crusading bandwagon against the challenge that social media presents to the 'established' media. Here's a tip - stop indulging in bullying, do your research, and we may start to respect a newspaper that takes its job seriously. Until then, I’ll be supporting the civil servants who care enough to talk to their friends about their joys and frustrations in their job.

[edited just to remove bizarrely duplicated content...]

Re: Baskers

solobasssteve — Sat, 13 Nov 2010 05:27:20 -0000

lovely lovely writing, sir. It's amazing what a difference *actually knowing someone* can do to one's ability to write an accurate, balanced, fair, profile of that person and what drives them. Letts' rancid salivating feigned outrage is orders of magnitude more destructive and atrophying to humanity than someone who admits to having a drink on a *social* network. Bullying hidden behind the smokescreen of pseudo-polite language and the under the banner of a national paper is no less detestable than stealing the dinner money from school kids. Letts is filth.

Re: Have I abandoned this blog?

solobasssteve — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 15:45:38 -0000

It's really odd how so many of us are leading parallel blog-journeys - seems like 2009 was the year of proliferation (adding more sites, syndicating our content to all our various profiles) and 2010 will be the year of consolidation, where we take the lessons learned, look where the value is, where the conversation and transparency of upload/processing are and stick with those.

And we'll all keep on learning. I'll be reading whatever you write, wherever you write it :)

Re: Bag of Spoons

solobasssteve — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 14:27:06 -0000

Steve, thanks so much for taking the time to write a review - I'm really glad you enjoyed it. We did too! Made a real change for me to be playing to a room full of bassists again, and it was mostly a pleasant surprise to be back doing that again :)

see you again soon, I hope

Re: Conversation platforms will make blogs increasingly redundant

solobasssteve — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 18:12:29 -0000

very interestest post,

I think there will be a trend in you direction, but a few things will keep blogs alive - one is the self-selection of web users as primary content producers, synthesisers and lurkers (David Jennings excellent book 'Net Blogs And Rock n Roll' explores this really well), as well as the deferential way that people naturally respond to those whose writing commands a different kind of response - there's still kudos to be had from sharing someone else branded space...

I love the move away from broadcasting to conversation, but I can still see place for blog posts in a world of conversation both as crafted essays (written with a different level of journalistic care and attention to conversational responses) and as a repository of 'complete' thoughts... In the same way that books are still going strong, but discussion about books is growing rapidly, I'd guess that the discussion culture would grow up around blogs... a lot of it, I guess, will happen as the implementation of granular APIs makes the porting of comment threads to comment aggregation sites easier...

And there are still occasions when one wants to log thoughts without it being explicitly for conversation... it might be a more person statement, or narrative about your life, and therefor the conversation format won't suit it.

granularity is the key, and it will hopefully happen at the intersection of design and APIs, facilitating multi-layered levels of concept/idea presentation and conversation starting...

This also brings up all kinds of questions about the degree to which the web is/isn't should/shouldn't be 'democratic', but that is a whole other discussion... :o)

cheers!

Steve

Re: If you had to choose between Twitter and your blog what would you choose?

solobasssteve — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 12:25:20 -0000

If it was a straight choice, I'd go with my blog - I am by nature a fairly verbose writer/thinker, so do enjoy having more than 140 characters to mess with. That said, Twitter has in a matter of weeks become a really vital part of my web/work-life. It's also been fantastic for driving traffic to my blog, for whatever that's worth...