Category: Work

LESS POSTING, MORE MAKING COOL THINGS

Seth Godin recently posted ‘Two chicken jokes,’ which – pardon the pun – cracked something open for me.

“Conversations and interactions become more than rote performance precisely because we can create, seek out and relieve tension.

Instability into stability and back again.”

Forget clicks and viral hits; the foundation is conversations.

I’m part of Scott Perry’s ‘Creative on Purpose‘ group. On Mondays and Fridays, we have a 30-minute call with people from a range of professions, ages, and backgrounds.

A 30-minute Zoom call for work can usually be summed up as “this could have been an email,” while conversations with amazing people can break things open. They can change your life!

Conversations with friends led to Metal Bandcamp Gift Club, which helped sell thousands of albums.

I’ve been discussing starting a music gear flea market with a friend.

Another friend and I are having conversations about launching a zine.

Is there a guaranteed outcome? Will this new thing become my big break? NO ONE KNOWS, and that’s the wonderful dance between instability and stability.

Will this music gear flea market work? There’s a chance it might not go well!

Will we get this zine launched this year? MAYBE?!

At some point, we have to stop posting and start discussing.

MUSIC IS A BATTLEFIELD

So this happened today.

“Condé Nast is merging Pitchfork, the digital music publication it bought in 2015, with men’s magazine GQ — a move that will result in layoffs at Pitchfork, including the exit of editor-in-chief Puja Patel.”

As Ted Gioia wrote in response, “Put faith in the music, not the business.”

In the early 2000s we had music blogs, today we’ve got AI generated playlists.

Not sure how this gets any better.

ALSO:

“In 2017 Vulture called Spotify’s RapCaviar playlist “the most influential playlist in music.” Among other things, it’s credited for launching the career of Cardi B.

But as Ashley Carman reported at Bloomberg this month, even RapCaviar’s influence is now on the wane. The reason, of course, is artificial intelligence.”

From “How platforms killed Pitchfork‘

AOL CONTENT OPTIMIZATION

In an effort to completely remove myself from social media, I am moving my WORK HISTORY from LinkedIn to my site, which is a platform I own and control. This will help me tell more of the story of my work experience. I hope it’s helpful. Enjoy.

Soon after my stint with AOL Music, I joined the “Content Optimization” team. Around 2006 is when AOL decided to move away from their “walled garden” system, and get out there on the open web.

The problem was no one on the open web – the bloggers – really knew about the CONTENT we were making.

I remember we had a sports vertical called Yardbarker, and they made features about NFL teams. My job was to reach out to bloggers and get them to link back to us. For real, I’d spend all day digging around for NY Giants blogs, and get them to link back to our photo gallery of some Giants feature.

 We also added stuff to Digg, Stumbleupon, Reddit, and Netscape (which was a user-generated news site at one time), all so people could find our AOL content.

I remember I helped increase the Technorati ranking of the Fanhouse Sports blog from 50,000 to 3,473, and now here we are 18 years later social media absolutely destroyed blogs and Technorati. I was on this team through the rest of 2006 I think, and I think I was making about $20/hr or so as a freelancer.

AOL MUSIC WEB PRODUCER

In an effort to completely remove myself from social media, I am moving my WORK HISTORY from LinkedIn to my site, which is a platform I own and control. This will help me tell more of the story of my work experience. I hope it’s helpful. Enjoy.

In April of 2006 I started my very first for-real web job, as a web producer at AOL Music. It was just a three month contract gig, covering for someone on maternity leave, with zero guarantee of anything afterwards.

I got this gig because I put my music blog (Buzzgrinder) on my Monster dot com resume, and a headhunter found me. I left a full time job with five weeks paid vacation for this gig, and looking back it was one of the best moves I ever made.

This was someone else’s set up, but I was able to plug in my iPod and listen to my own music while I worked. I wrote copy for weekly new songs and videos features, built and scheduled music main page graphical elements, and wrote daily headlines for Music Main news section.

Some of the people that worked at AOL Music recognized me from the referral traffic that Buzzgrinder sent them, which blew me away.

I remember seeing artists come in and perform acoustic in conference rooms, which was sort of the start of AOL Sessions.

I had typos on pages that were seen by millions. This is where I learned a valuable lesson from a co-worker, when he was sitting beside me while I got “talked to” for my mistake – “we’re not saving lives!”

Oh yeah, I auditioned to host The DL, which was AOL Music’s “music show,” but Sara Schaefer got the job and MURDERED IT. They picked the right person for the job on that one.

My time with AOL Music music last just 3-4 months (I can’t really remember how long it was), but I met a lot of amazing people along the way.

Oh yeah, around this time in 2006 the #1 music site on the internet was MySpace. Wild, right?

WHERE I WRITE

My desk is on wheels, so sometimes it faces east; sometimes, I swing it around so I can look west.

I use a standing desk that I bought in 2019 or so, before the pandemic. Attaching the power strip to the leg was a recent move, to make it easier to wheel around, with the cords getting caught under the wheels.

Yeah, the cords take away from the “minimal aesthetic,” but I need power, and my external HD plugged in, so whatever. This really works for me. I can’t stand having a lot of stuff on my desk while working, so having a small desk makes that easier.

Thanks to @Beth Kempton for these #meetthewriter prompts.

WE’RE TIRED

Tis the season to hear from almost everybody how frazzled, burnt out, at wits end they are! No energy! No motivation! No drive! Exploited and driven to exhaustion, with no energy to make things better, let alone make dinner tonight.

ENERGY

Sam Altman on burnout:

This quote is the clincher for me:

“Oh, actually when I’m doing this thing that I like and that is working I have a huge amount of energy and I can get a lot of stuff done.”

When I am doing things I loathe, I have zero energy, drive, or ambition.

Takeaway – do more of the things that give you energy.

Be around people that give you energy.

Watch and listen to things that give you energy.