This is just a small update. As you may know I am a graphic designer / communication designer as well as (now) a music producer. While the design side of things is purely commercial I noticed the data portability group got into a little hot water with their logo being too similar to that of Red Hat’s logo (apparently). When I saw they were holding a competition for a new logo i quickly whipped up an entry and I’ve just been informed it’s in the top 15!

You can see the top 15 here: http://dataportability.techcrunch.com/ (Mine is the first logo). It appears my logo is one of the more favoured logos which is excellent. If you are in a voting mood feel free to vote for my entry

Now on the other side of the coin – Music Production – I take it very seriously but at this stage I’m yet to have any official releases. I prefer to just remix what I like and pick up new techniques along the way. I made an entry into the Foals remix competition and now my remix is live. You can listen (stream & download) here:

http://www.last.fm/music/Foals/_/Electric+Bloom+(Blaze+Tripp+Remix)

The winner is based on the number of plays (scrobbles) to the last.fm system. If you arent registered to last.fm you really should. I personally think it is one of the best social networks around as it brings you closer to the people who like the same music you do. It works better than anything else I have seen anyway.

I dont normally enter competition so I find it funny that I’m in this spot now to try and promote these community based competitions. In any case it will be interesting to see the outcomes.

If you feel like sharing the love your votes will be appreciated very much

 Are you looking for a good music production forum? Checkout MusicProductionTalk.com

Now onto the news… Well looky looky. A whole year (and then some) has gone and I haven’t even made time to post on this blog. A lot has been happening and although I am supposed to updated interesting things here I just haven’t had the time of the inclination (in the words of Jack Nickelson in A Few Good Men).

There have been a few interesting things happening here and there. For example:

• This blog exploded after i posted to the New Knight Rider Movie (2008) which is supposed to happen. There have been 228 legitimate comments on my blog entry alone and it’s caused a real stir amongst the Knight Rider community. I have never been a huge fan of Knight Rider, hell I’m not sure I’ve even seen a full episode but somehow you guys have bein going crazy over it all. A good example is the 65,000+ views on the flickr image of the new knight rider poster!
• I have been producing and djing a lot over the last 12 months. I even played one of the biggest festivals in Australia which was rather fun. Since I have found there is a gap in the market for a good generic Music Production Discussion Forum. Since, I have setup Music Production Talk – A studio production discussion forum. So if you have any music production or live dj/performance questions please dont hesitate to sign up and start posting!
• What else? I’m sure there’s a lot more but alas time constraints ensue and I must run!

Take it easy in 2008. I apologise for no posts in 2007 but lets make 2008 rock!

Happy new year for 2007. May 2006 be gone! This new years would have to go down as one of the craziest for me. Didn’t get to bed until 9am. Seriously.

May you all have a happy and prosperous year ahead. It should be a good year

Breaking news, Utube has succumbed to the better option (ie: my advice) and monetized their website with a search bar at the top of their homepage. Now you can get instant access to all the wonderful world of poker / dating & xtreme travel.

At least utube have chosen a smart, professional looking & unobtrusive option without losing too much integrity. The search bar only appears on the homepage & search pages. The only problem with this approach is that it appears this type of monetization doesn’t quite cash in on the video traffic they will be recieving. Thereare no video links or other various other video-targeted strategies I would have imagined. For example, if we were searching for a video of the latest internet hype, Chaccaron, the netflix results return a terrible no results page instead of something that may direct me to a video site, any video site. The only other results I get from searching with utube are Poker ads, which are like the scourge of the internet (even if they do pay well).

I think utube has succeeded in the look & feel of their monetizing efforts, but the execution will leave a lot to be desired. At the end of the day if they leave it like this, they wont make nearly as much money as I predicted they could.

“Two years from now, spam will be solved”

Bill Gates – January 24, 2004

I was just reading up on Wired’s 2006 Tech Foot-in-mouth awards. It just really proves tech companies are full of shit (among other things).

The video of the one and only La Chomba doing the Chaccaron. It’s simply amazing to finally see people with true musical talent realising their full potential. We can only hope to see more from Da Chomba Man himself in the future.

(YouTube Video)

PS: I don’t know much about this guy but I think he also goes under the guise of andy’s val gourmet – chacarron macarron.

PSS: Does anyone have the lyrics for this? I’be been searching high and low!

It has come to my attention the company who owns utube.com is sueing YouTube!

From here via drmike:

YouTube is being sued by an industrial equipment maker whose domain name is Utube.com. Universal Tube and Rollform Equipment said it has been deluged by confused video searchers causing numerous crashes of its site and costing it business. The company’s site once drew a steady 1,500 unique users monthly, Utube said, but that figure has soared to some 2 million per month in recent weeks.

This almost makes me extremely angry. I honestly dont know what UTube are thinking here. Something tells me they heard Google bought YouTube out for billions of dollars and somehow they saw dollar signs in their own eyes. It’s not hard to see how this could happen, they just don’t know how truly stupid they are – for a number of reasons.

1. Sueing Google for this is… well… Stupid.

Do I really need to explain how big Google is. But it’s not just theie size that’s a worry. Try the fact that they are complete and utter experts in the web AND technology AND law. If you are suing for something like this, I’d almost compare this with trying to sue Russia. No matter how good UTube’s their argument is, Google will get out of this quite easily.

2. Monetising Your Website means money… lots of it.

I don’t think UTube realise how much cash they would make if they did the following 3 simple steps:

• Moved their corporate website to utubellc.com or something
  (Keep in mind they can still keep their emails on utube.com and also even place a banner to redirect existing clients to their new website)
• Place their website on a domain sponsor page
  or actually develop a small video/media website with ads.
  or even place a one page website with a carefully chose ppc (pay per click) or affiliate program

They could make so much damn money.

For instance…. they are claiming to have 2,000,000 visitors a month. Now lets say they found & utilised a targeted video advertising campaign that gave them 10 cents a click. Keep in mind this is a very very conservative number considering I have basic websites on Google Adsense that can earn up to $1 dollar a click.

Ok now lets just say that conservatively 25% of users clicked through. This all depends on how well the ad is targeted & integrated into the website. I personally believe you could achieve 75% with the right advertising but for now lets say 25%.

Based on the above very conservative calculations, utube.com could make $50,000 in the first month. Not to mention traffic could (and WILL) grow, you could (and WILL be able to) find a better affiliate program in time. This is so scalable as well, for instance 50cents/click at 50% click through at the current rate would mean 10 times this amount: $500,000. This is half a million dollars a month if they play their cards right.

Now I don’t know how large this company is, but honestly how important is a website on a particular domain for a TUBING company. I mean c’mon! An extra 6 million dollars/year revenue is nothing to sneeze at. Especially for just being in the right place at the right time. Not to mention I highly doubt they could settle this at court for any amount near the potential yearly income.

Also don’t forget this will solve their problem with bandwidth issues yet they can still have a reputable website & their email addresses need not change.

Conclusion

I think the best way to look at this would be to compare it to having a Fish & Chip shop on a quiet area of town. Then all of a sudden that part of town gets extremely busy & everyone in the town all of a sudden needs Gummi Bears, and you get lots of people coming into the Fish & Chip store asking for Gummi Bears because you now have the best location in town. You have the option to move out of the busy suburb & keep your current store (being able to convert it into a Gummi bear store or at least refer people to a good gummi bear store for kickbacks). What would you do? What… would you do?

This guy appears to have very good reason to sell his car. You might need to have a few shots of bourbon to completely understand what he’s saying but when you do – you’ll definately feel his pain.

I wish i was finnish.

The artwork.

Purchasing website/file hosting is sometimes like gambling. You win some, you lose some. (And in fact, some lose the lot) .

A few months ago I took a gamble and signed up to DreamHost, one of the most popular and widely used web hosting companies on the internet. I didn’t really know why they were so widely used and popular – they had a bad webpage and it all looked to good to be true.

I ended up signing up with a promo code and paying something incredibly low like $50 for a whole year of hosting with a free domain name thrown in. That price included 20gig of space and 1000gb of bandwidth! Insane. Not to mention every single week it goes up in gigabytes of space & bandwidth! Even crazier!

Now you wont believe what they did last week. Try: “Hey lets double everyones bandwidth” and “Hey lets give every 10 times more space.” No Kidding. I now have 200gig of space and 2000gig of bandwidth each month. Storage grows by 1gb a week and Bandwidth grows by 16gb a week. What’s going on here! These guys must be mad but it has happened. Some customers are even using this service as an offline backup hosting solution and just tranferring everything to their DreamHost account.

What now? Well I reccomend DreamHost if you truly want to host anything and everything you want on the web without having to worry about limits (this service is practically no limits with the amount they give you) & if you want a reliable large web/file host. They are even releasing new products such as files forever which enables you to store you files forever with a price that is practically for free! It’s just too good to be true – sign up before they raise their prices.

For those who are interested I have a promo code you can use to get yourself $50 off instantly. It just makes it even cheaper. Just enter the code: BLAZE50 when prompted on the signup screen and they will honour the discount for you.

Also if you can refer people in the future, you end up with cash in your back pocket or completely free hosting. So it helps to spread the word.

A new night rider movie coming out in 2008 with a Koenigsegg CCX as KIT?! Is this serious? Is this going to happen? If so, they couldnt have chosen a cooler car

Update: David Hasselhoff is confirmed and I found the following info on wikipedia:

Knight Rider: The Movie is the possible title for a feature film adaptation of the hit 1980s NBC television program, Knight Rider. On May 9, 2006, two leading film websites, Comingsoon.net and IGN’s Filmforce reported that The Weinstein Company had acquired the rights to the franchise from creator Glen A. Larson and will be producing a Knight Rider feature film.

Rumored to be in development since at least 2002, this new film was almost nixed at least twice due to David Hasselhoff’s insistence that the script be faithful to the show. One of his demands was that KITT should be similar to his predecessor. Negotiations stalled when studios to whom the concept was pitched refused to allow it, but resumed again in 2005 when they finally conceded and allowed a new script to be written, this time with the new KITT retaining his predecessor’s characteristics.

IMDB seems to have a page about it but I’m not quite convinced. Maybe someone could shed a bit of light onto the subject?

Just playing around with testing to record a mix with my new DJ gear. This was done into the mic input of my laptop so im not sure if the sound quality is amazing. Its quite a compressed mp3 too which I didnt realise.

Keep in mind the mixing sorta sucks too. I did the whole thing in my headphones.

Enjoy:

Blaze Mix 9th October 2006 (Right click, Save Target/Link As)

NOTE: I HAVE RECORDED MANY MORE MIXES SINCE THIS POST THAT ARE MUCH BETTER QUALITY & WITH FULL TRACKLISTS ETC. HEAD OVER TO MY LAST.FM JOURNAL FOR ALLTHE LATEST MIXES WITH MP3 LINKS

Tracks Include songs by Quesh, Les Rythmes Digitales, Chromeo, MSTRKRFT & more….

Update: I recorded this mix with my mic input on my laptop and well I have now worked out that the mic really isnt the best option for recording an audio except for… you guessed it… your voice. Honestly though, I thought laptop makers would made an easy way to get a line-in input going. Ah well you can still enjoy the mix, just next time I’ll have to drag my desktop pc into the dj room

Also posted on Last.FM

…and the power of unexpected advertising.

Google makes so much money from “contextual advertising.” This basically means they serve (somewhat) relevant advertisements to users based on what they are searching for or looking at on other websites. This was a good idea at the time of conception and it’s proved to be extremely successful & profitable for Google and a lot of their advertisers.

But, Is “Related Content” enough?

Many have speculated over Google’s ability to make money in the future & if contextual advertising is enough to sustain the company. I often though these concerns weren’t very valid with Google being an 800 pound gorilla who is completely dominating online search & online advertising. I mean lets face it, it’s their cashcow and they don’t have a another similar sized income stream to fall back on.

Enough about Big G though, what about YOU!

I don’t know about you but I quite like stumbling upon things I don’t know existed and various things I would not normally find out about. I mean cmon, that’s what advertising is all about isn’t it?

So lets explore different methods of getting to people. Like setting up a fake youtube user called lonelygirl15 and making random videos and decieving the viewers that it is a real girl out there somewhere… yeah.. right. Interesting example though. It’s a slippery slope when you start tricking your users though.

Flash isn’t dead. In fact, Flash could well be growing in more of a niche than we realised. A lot of people may already know this but STOP PRESS: 1. SEO is great, but it’s strategies & implementation tend to spoil a website (gasp, ooh ahhh!). 2. Flash is great, for multimedia style presentations with fantastic creative displays of information & visual elements – when you don’t need to index a million pages & be number one for everything and top 10 google and ppc and adsense and paid links and ctrs and arrrrrrrgh! . . . . . Brain Explode!

My point here is simple: talk to more REAL people (not search engines). The best way to do this is to draw them in with creativity & good flash.

Don’t get me wrong, SEO is important.

…But there are so many people on the bandwagon. It’s gone to the extent of a large number of people using SEO practices as the basis for building websites.

Why not engage & use real life principles.

Be Creative

Be Spontaneous

& most of all

Be Intersting

Also I have found a good site with some good visual flash FX (effects) for those interested after the jump.
Those cool flash FX your mother didn’t teach you about…

Gold: Flash Fish Tank With Genuine looking fish. I gotta use this someday.

Silver: Mutliple Scrolling Depth of Field Layers thingy. Very classy.

Bronze: A very usable navigation zoomy layout. Mmmmm

Honorable Mention: Creative freemoving ball nav. Almost amazing

Enjoy!

So it’s been a while since I’ve posted an entry. This is due to a few reasons…

• I sort of got annoyed with having to blog and post.
• I got annoyed with the whole “tech” scene and the “tech blogging” scene.
• I got REAL busy.
• … then (as if on cue) my laptop hard drive died and I lost 80gb worth of work, emails, files, financial files, music production files, music & more.
  (ps: do not try to tell me how to prevent this in the future, believe it or not – it doesn’t help)

Things are back on track now though and I have also been doign work with an Advertising Agency and it’s really interesting stuff. There’s something fulfilling about harnessing creativity and getting paid for it.

The calm after the storm

So now things are starting to calm down a bit more I have to finish off a bunch of client work and then I will be venturing into the slightly unknown: creating my own sites, ideas & monetising them. Ideally I would like an easy to maintain supplemental income on the side whoile being able to focus on client work 9-5. I have a whole bunch of new ideas for websites and I will be launching them on this blog soon. So stay tuned. Eventually I want to work towards a project that I will create when I am more relaxed

I’m “semi” glad to see Web 2.0 losting its buzz

Web2.0 served it’s purpose to excite the buzz surrounding the web but now it’s petered off. I’m glad about this because people need to focus on real things, not fuzz & fluff hot air ideas that will get you nowhere (case in point: too many to mention).

But truly this point needs a whole post to elaborate completely on the whole situation.

So why would you want to come back here?
Writing in my style is the idea. I just want to make it short, punchy & do stuff a little more creative around here. Plus in the past I focused on absolute shit boring things. Let’s keep it succinct & interesting. You don’t really have to come back but in the future I hope to be writing stuff that will make you come back!

And also in the news!

• I got my first iPod – 30gb video (very nice)
• I’ve been working on a quad g5 (which has just been superceeded, but even still, it rocks)
• I got a pocket watch!(next on the list: smoking jacket & pipe)
• I got a lava lamp (life almost seems complete now)
• I got a new digi cam (flickr here I come)
• I’m getting CDJ’s. (i think i’ll post mixes up on here? who knows!)
• I got some Dreamhost hosting (cheap, huge, fast, reliable – hell what more could you want. want to sign up? use the promo code blaze50 when signing up and it’ll get you $50 off – sweet!)
• I got my first wireless mouse ($15! – late bloomer)
• I still have the same hot girlfriend! (no she hasn’t left me yet! bonus! :p)

Anyway enough of the personal stuff…

Have a good day & thanks for all the fish.

WordPress has really proven itself to be one of the most functional, best looking, easy to use and now scalable blogging applications out there. Here on wordpress.com they have superceeded 200,000 blogs.

Some interesting stats they have posted:

In the past 10 days, WordPress.com bloggers have….

• Created 14,100 blogs
• Added 30,300 static pages
• Tagged 188,259 tags on posts
• Gotten 267,490 comments
• Written 291,000 posts
• Have 779,325 feed subscribers
• Had 6,832,322 pageviews!

That's simply amazing to think that wordpress.com would recieve over 20million hits a month and still manages to handle 200,000 blogs.

Congratulations to Matt & the team for keeping the whole process here easy & painless.

I would reccomend anyone to get a blog here over blogger or any other service.

Take a look at this picture:

Google has made its millions upon millions upon millions of dollars providing relevant content. Why is it then when you click on "Spam" in GMail, that you get an array of recipies to make spam sandwiches, spam bakes and spam tortilla sandwiches (among other things).

Congrats Google, that is not only incredibly relevant but also amazingly useful!

Note: Disregard the following links and just try and use the links on my profile. WordPress can't seem to sort out the linking issue to last.fm.
Well I seem to have been upgraded to a last.fm subscriber (my profile) for now which is great. I get access to a few more feature which are good. Features that have always been free though are listening to radio. I fancy myself as a bit of a DJ or "good music chooser" might be the better choice for now, so why don't you sign up and then click some of the following links to fire up a 128kbits mp3 stream from last.fm of some good tracks.

• Blaze's Personal Radio plays a lot of the music I do, so check that one for some good tracks. It's quite a good match they have there of the stuff I get into, well done lastfm.
• Here's a radio station I made up combining a bunch of my favourite artists at the moment. Quite a disco house style, some french touch and a bit of electro in there too. This seems to play a lot of semi older tracks (80s and 90s style) but it's fantastic.
• I have a bunch of neighbours that like similar music to them, so why not listen to some of Blaze's Neighbours? They surely have some interesting stuff.

I normally wouldn't make a post about something like this but last.fm suprised me with the kind of tracks they were playing. Admittedly I dont listen to very much commercial music but they seem to be getting a lot of it down well.

If you're not on lastfm yet, sign up now and start saving your music history, you never know what you will find in the future. It is truly an exciting place to be.

I have just switched from Google Home to Netvibes and let me tell you, it's really really good. I like having a custom homepage with all of my favourite feeds and Google Home worked for me quite ok up until now. I had actually tried Netvibes when I made the choice to Google back in the day and it wasnt quite polished enough for my liking. The interface was clunky and hardly worked. Now they really have got it together and the service works great.

I currently have my homepage split up into:

• General (24)
• Blogs / Tech (49)
• Blogs / Business (19)
• Blogs / Music (73)
• Blog / Design (21)

It's working a treat . These guys really know how to put together an easy to use homepage and you have just won some business from a previous google user. Well done.