I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again; I’ve been a Jonathan Harris fan since I first saw We Feel Fine when I was back in college. His raw ability to find and draw emotions from people and implement them in interesting, intriguing platforms is so inspirational. Now more than ever, in a time when everything is short and passive and under 140 characters, these heart felt, human, tear jerking, hair-on-the-back-of-your neck stories scream to me and I find it so energizing.

I posted a while back about Cowbird and what it’s potential effect on the evolution of journalism might be, so when I saw this talk by Jonathan at PSFK this year, I was intrigued to find out how the project itself was growing.

I’ll try and get the thoughts that I had down on the page, it started with this point:

We Feel Fine
In 2004, it was collecting over 20,000 emotions every day. Now in 2012, despite the HUGE increase in web users, emotional expressions have dropped to 8,000 each day. This could partly be due to the fact that We Feel Fine is not scraping Facebook as it’s ‘not public’ information.

But this caveat made me think, is the Facebook point void, do people really express their emotions on Facebook? Not to my experience, but I may be wrong.

My main thought out of this was that people have stopped expressing themselves. I’m an emotional kinda guy, and watching, reading and hearing the stories on Cowbird fill me with an optimism that humanity and the internet can come together. It doesn’t require dedicated, authored content, it shouldn’t feel elitist, all you have to do is take a look at Post Secret and you can see that there are plenty of feelings out there, and most of these wouldn’t even need 140 characters.

I feel like I could type for a while longer on this train of thought but I’ll try and cut it short.

The more human emotion that can make it’s way in to people’s online communications, the less lonely and isolated people are going to feel, it will make all the disposable content that’s out there feel second tier, and it would create a warmth and a relatable value around peoples’ online personas. It will take a huge amount of censorship and a shift in perception of social networks, but it would be an evolutionary twist. One of Harris’ closing points is this:

“Theres certain stuff that I think is worth telling stories about and a lot of what is communicated now, online, I dont think necessarily meets that criteria.” It’s around 33:30 in the video, you should listen to the end of it – he talks about what he feels makes valid content, and I really couldn’t agree more.

Ironically, if you listen to that criteria, I’m not certain this post meets it.

Jonathan Harris: Cowbird And Humanizing The Web from Piers Fawkes on Vimeo.

Metric have created a fun social game around the launch of their new album, Synthetica. Due out in June, they’ve released a behind the scenes video and sheet music to one of the main tracks, as rewards for partaking in a game on their web page.

This idea of releasing the sheet music is awesome. You’d be able to hear a rendition of the song before it’s even released, and I’m intrigued to see what all the different musicians’ covers will sound like.

Genius little idea.

It’s always been both a legal and technical difficulty for sites to host music on their sites. Either you embedded a crazy, random player linked to an illegal MP3 file or more recently, people just embedding YouTube videos on their site, both not good technically, and both questionable-at-best legally.

Finally, Spotify has stepped up to the mark. They have released the Spotify Play Button, a simple piece of script you can embed in your page linked a Spotify track or playlist. The stream is great quality, it’s all legal, and best of all the artists get paid.

On a cultural front, this is very smart of Spotify, not least of all as they somehow wrote the capability to do this into their contracts with the labels in the first place, something other online music sites apparently failed to do, didn’t think of or didn’t capitalize on.

On a technical front, this is a smart little widget. It syncs with your Spotify app if you’re logged in, if you click play on the widget, it pauses your player for you so you don’t get overlapping music. It also opens the playlist/track in your Spotify app, so if you find something you like in the widget, you can just jump over and pull whatever you want into your own collection.

On top of it all, they’ve launched with partners like Rolling Stone, Spin and NME…well done all round, solid effort.

Whilst having a very interesting drive in a moving van yesterday, I was chatting with the driver, who we found on Craigslist, where most of his business came from. He said “about 60% referrals and about 40% from Craigslist”, he then said that he wanted to expand, and when he got a second van, he would post on Task Rabbit.

“What’s Task Rabbit?” I hear you ask.

Well that’s what I asked anyway, it turns out, it’s a site where people can post their skills, and people can browse for people that can fulfill certain needs they have. Furniture movers, Ikea Assemblers, Laundry Doers, you name it, they’re on there.

Such a simple idea and really well executed. @stephsheng and I were chatting about it, and she described it as a return to the way things used to be; you need your table fixed, you go to the village carpenter, just now the village has 13 million occupants and there are 200,000 carpenters, none of which you’ve ever met.

Sites like this allow these carpenters to build up their social currency by doing good work and getting good reviews. Subsequently, people get hard working, honest, real-world people to help them get stuff done.

The globalisation of communications has gone full circle and is now helping local communities grow and develop together, back to the days of bulletin boards and community forums, but this time with shinier logos, AJAX interfaces and less scrolling marquees.

In a similar way that the military drives technological development, porn drives media consumption. From magazines, to websites, to video streaming, now comes the birth of interactive videos.

This film for “Only”, is a really nicely produced piece, a short story about young people finding their freedom. As the video plays, you can pause it and find out more about the garments the characters are wearing, a moving lifestyle piece.

This is cool, but it was done 6 years ago, and it came in the form of porn. I know at least one person who will remember the video, it consisted of two young women on a rotating, circular podium that were slowly stripping each other. As the layers came away, you could rollover the garments for details, think Agent Provocateur style.

It’s interesting how porn is such a driving force. A secretive part of so many people’s lives, generating billions of dollars a year, subtly moving the world forward.

The video link came courtesy of @tanyaholbrook

So I haven’t had chance to post lately, not least of all due to the fact that I moved from one coast of America to the other. It’s been a crazy 3 weeks, but we’re finally here. @stephsheng and I have our apartment and shared our first meal (on the floor that will soon be occupied by a dining table) on Friday.

It’s only going to get better from here.