The Next Big Sound

Have you ever wanted an easy way to figure out how much buzz a band is building?  If so, you should check out the analytics website The Next Big Sound.  By compiling statistics from social media sites such as MySpace, Last.fm, iLike, Facebook, Twitter, and Bebo to determine a band's or artist's popularity.


It's able to show how the number of fans, plays, or comments for a certain band increases over a week, month or all time.  For instance, look at the graph at the top of this blog which is based on Local Natives.  It's no coincidence that a sharp increase in the number of fans occured around March 23 because that was when they were playing at South by Southwest.

The Next Big Sound also provides you with amusing yet disturbing information such as Canadian reggae musician Snow somehow gaining 24 new fans on March 28th.  I can't believe there's even 24 people who like Snow, forget new people.

You can even compare bands to see whose fan base is growing faster, although it might just be depressing to see someone like Ke$ha having more fans than a real band.

Of course, the The Next Big Sound is really the ultimate hipster tool.  Now they can know exactly when a band has become too cool to like anymore.  Better yet, you could out hipster them by citing exactly how popular their favorite obscure indie band has become.

Local Natives - Gorilla Manor

I highlighted the LA band Local Natives and their "Daytrotter EP" in this space back in September.   At the time, they had finished recording their full length album "Gorilla Manor," but didn't have a US release date for it yet.

Well now, this band is starting to generate some serious buzz.  It finally released "Gorilla Manor" on February 16th and followed up last year's successful appearance at the South by Southwest Festival with another one at SXSW 2010.

The album lives up to the promise of the EP and even features all five songs from the EP (including an amazing cover of the Talking Heads' "Warning Sign" which I forgot to mentioned before).

In addition to those five songs, there are nine new ones such as "Wide Eyes," "Camera Talk," and "Cubism Dream."  Overall, it's a quality album if you're into their style of music.

I'm not all that familiar with Fleet Foxes, but I'm told Local Natives kind of have a similar same sound.

Check out Local Natives' performance at SXSW 2010 here and judge for yourself.

Hugh Jackman Dancing Lipton Ice Tea Commercial

Well ice tea just got as confusing as Hugh Jackman's sexuality .  In this Japanese Lipton Ice Tea commercial, Jackman dances in a hotel to express his love for ice tea.

Stuff like this, is really suppose to convince us how heterosexual Jackman is?  And he wears Hawaiian shirts without being a big fat party animal.  Nobody really cares if he's gay, it's just annoying that he won't admit it.

I like ice tea as much as anyone else, but it's not a valid excuse to launch into a choreographed dance number.  Although, it does make for a pretty entertaining commercial.

Get Your March Madness Fix

One of the greatest times of the year is upon us: March Madness.  The NCAA Men's Basketball Tournament is like a second Christmas for basketball fans or first for some I guess.

Over the last couple of years, it's become easier for fans to get their March Madness fix online as March Madness on Demand allows fans to watch tournament games online.  It's not so good for work productivity, but great if you don't want to miss any of the action.


This year a new website called NCAA Vault has added a sense of history to the March Madness online experience.  It features full games and highlights from every Sweet 16 game this decade.  Better yet you can sort by teams, players, and games.

There's even more specific categories such as dunks, great shots, great blocks, great plays, and great finishes which serve as helpful reminders of exceptional moments you may have forgotten.  If you're really ambitious you can search and navigate within full games for specific moments then create a link of that moment to a social media or blogs.

For instance I can link to Villanova's Scottie Reynolds hitting the shot that knocked Pittsburgh out last year.

Overall it's a pretty awesome website, and it's especially great if you want to rub an agonizing defeat in your friend's face by repeatedly linking to a clip of that defeat.

Rock-Paper-Scissors Glove

Engadget highlights a glove that's specifically made for rock-paper-scissors . Sure nobody actually needs one but it's still kind of cool.  The glove allows you to play rock-paper-scissors against yourself, and it even identifies your tendencies or weakness in the game.


For instance, maybe you choose paper a lot so the glove will know that and counter with scissors.



It's a good thing you can play by yourself because it's likely that anybody that buys this glove will not have friends to play with.  And if you do have friends, being the nerd alert that bought this glove isn't going to help you keep them.  Nobody wants to be associated with that weird guy always wearing the glove.

All that said, there are some positives about having this glove.  You'll be so good at rock-paper-scissors that you'd never lose the game that decides who's the first person to go into the creepy abandoned serial killer house to check it out.

But really, there's one clear advantage to the glove that trumps everything else.  You'd always have a good reason to say this about it:

Rock Steady

The Whispers 1987 hit "Rock Steady" is one of those catchy songs you'll randomly hear on the radio but have no clue who the artist is because you don't yet have an Iphone.  It's your quintessential 80's R&B song, but it was a lot better before I actually saw the music video.

I never imagined the song was sung by a bunch of middle-aged guys with creepy facial hair that appear to be the only black guys that can't dance.  Look at them, they dance like a father embarrassing his children at a high school dance.


Then there's the facial hair.  At first glance, I thought a group of sexual predators got together to form a musical group as a ploy to lure victims to them.

 I especially wouldn't trust that guy with the full face beard that looks like Kimbo Slice or Baron Davis.  He seems to like "rock steadying" a little too much.

Baron Davis knows how to

rock steady

Finally, the video makes no sense.  I don't even know what's going on.  It seems like they're performing in some club or on an outdoor stage where all these people show up to dance.  No way they would get into that club that's suppose to be that cool so that crowd is probably just them hallucinating.

By far the best part of the whole video is the Miami Vice looking white dude with the afro and sunglasses dancing in the crowd at 3:37.

The moral of the story is that "Rock Steady" is still a good song, but it's much better heard than seen so let's all forget this video ever happened.  Okay, or at the very least convince ourselves that the Miami Vice looking dude sings this song. 

Just Follow Your Nose

I always knew that Toucan Sam was on to something when he told me to follow my nose.  He wasn't just selling Fruit Loops, he was giving life advice according to this Daily Mail story that says that a person's nose says a lot about him or her.


Obviously this is something you have take with a grain of salt, but it's still interesting.  At least it was until I thought about how much better eating a bowl of Fruit Loops would be right now than reading this and lost interest.

Smash Mouth in the Closet

I'm usually a harsh critic of SNL not being funny most of the time, but the SNL skit "Smash Mouth Terrors" is actually funny.  It's completely random which makes it even better.

There really wouldn't be many things scarier than Smashmouth actually coming out of your closet except for Courtney Love or these guys.

If Lost Was Like Baywatch

Someone showed this to me, and it's pretty great.  They both take place near water and have lots of shirtless people so it kind of makes sense.

The only way it could have been better was if it had a shot of the smoke monster killing people followed by a quick cut to a bunch of characters laughing.

Everybody is Big Brother

You're the biggest threat to your privacy.   By using social media sites to constantly inform peers of your interests, beliefs, locations, opinions, and life details, it means almost anyone can watch you like Big Brother,  the all seeing and all knowing fictional dictator from George Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. 

In fact it's downright scary how similar social media has made modern society to Orwell's vision of it.   Individuals suffer real world consequences for actions or content posted on sites such as Facebook and Twitter because unknown to them, authorities are surreptitiously monitoring them.    

I guess Sandra Bullock's awful 1995 film "The Net" tried to warn us that people's privacy would be invaded by their internet activities, but I never could get passed how unrealistically easy it was for Bullock to order a pizza online.  It's still not that easy, efficient, or common place as it was portrayed in the movie.

And she was using a dial up modem to boot.  It would have taken at least half the night for her connection to even go through so she could order and another half of the night for the pizza place to actually receive it.

Giving away our right to privacy is always major concern, yet millions of people are doing it.  Why?  Well, there are several reasons.  The primary one being that social media has convinced us that we're all important and people need to know about our lives.  Apparently that's all Big Brother had to do to trick us into divulging this once guarded information.

You're not compromising your privacy on Facebook or Twitter,  you're informing and entertaining people with details of your life.  We're almost all guilty of this as being part of social media networks appears to be a requirement these days.  A person not participating in one is as rare as someone who still uses a beeper.

But think of all this in a different context for a moment.  If someone you barely knew came up to you on the street and started reciting all the information that you've posted, you'd probably be pretty freaked out about how much the person knows about you.  In fact, he or she would seem like some sort of crazy stalker instead of someone that casually checks the updates on their social media networks.

Also, I'm convinced people and especially teenagers are getting stupider.  Seriously, I don't understand how kids can still be getting abducted over the internet.  It's not like this is still the mid 90s where we assumed everybody on internet was safe and then all proceeded to use sketchy America Online chat rooms full of predators.

Not to mention, teenagers seem to like posting photographic or video evidence of themselves committing crimes.  That's a good idea if the next video you want to star in is prison security footage of inmates doing unpleasant things to you.  Kind of like what happens to the monopoly man in prison.

With the emergence of Foursquare, a location-based social networking website for mobile platforms, things could be getting worse.  It makes a game out of declaring your location in real time, which is fun until your apartment gets robbed because you just had to let everybody know that you were out eating frozen yogurt.

Of course, this doesn't mean that all social media networks are evil, no one should use them.  Actually, I'm as addicted to using Facebook as anybody else.  It's just very ironic that people complaining about the Big Brother mentality of government or society violating their privacy are the same ones carelessly providing intimate details to random people through social media.