The advantages:

• some applications for iPhone/iPod just have no worthy counterpart in the ‘normal’ world.
• an application would run immediately on Apple MacOSX as well as Windows XP/Vista/7
• the iPhone developers wouldn’t be looking anymore at a potential audience of some X million iPhone owners, but at all iTunes owners.

Research analyst Sam Bhavnani, of the market research firm Current Analysis, says that iTunes has 200 million users. Research analyst Shaw Wu, of the market research firm American Technology Research, gives a figure of 100 million. Oddly, Apple itself gives a much lower number: 10 million.
Google Answers

Related posts:

1. Touched by the iPod As most geeks in my circle of friends, I am...
2. Is that an iPhone in your trousers? Ok, it’s a nice phone, but will all those...
3. Create your own iPhone ring tones I’ve had my iPhone for a week (loving it!) and...

Try to guess which movies these are (click on the image to see a high-res version):

 #1

 #2

 #3

And for #4 and #5 I’m gonna give a hint: it’s science fiction!
#4

#5

Wordle is really cool!

The answers:

1. Casablanca
2. Vicky Cristina Barcelona
3. Lucia y el sexo
4. Star Wars III
5. Star Trek

No related posts.

So I decided to let Facebook check my Gmail contact list to see if I had missed some contacts (people using aliases, etc …). After carefully selecting a couple of FB friends to invite (a buddy from the army, …), I clicked ‘Select’ and then ‘OK’ on the next screen that I supposed was a ‘Confirm’ window. I didn’t even read what was written on it. Some minutes later I saw emails starting to come in on different email aliases I had created in all my years of Internet activity. Apparently I allowed Facebook to send email messages to all Gmail contacts with email addresses that were not yet ‘known’ in Facebook. I have about 1500 addresses in my Gmail, let’s say some 500 already have a FB profile: so I just allowed Facebook to send out 1000 ‘unsollicited commercial emails’ or *spam* on my behalf. There is no way for me to know how many emails went out, nor to whom. I feel strongly embarrased, since I have been a strong opponent of spam for years, and since I have no idea who I have bothered with this bulk mail.

A company like Facebook probably has a whole team concentrated on user experience and workflow streamlining, so I can only assume that this strategy is by design. They probably have to keep the monthly exponential growth numbers so they use every opportunity to collect new email addresses. This is plain wrong. The default should be ‘opt in‘, not ‘opt out‘ (that is, select those you want to invite instead of unselect those you don’t wanto to invite).

So dear Christopher Cox and/or Chamath Palihapitiya at Facebook, while you will probably say that ‘but it is clearly written on the page that they’re about to send an invitation to (in my case, 1000??) contacts‘, you know that you are wrong on this one. You’re spamming. Big time, like real jerks. Since you’re probably not going to do anything about it, Google: any ideas?

http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/gmail/thread?tid=46004a5733eee4f0&hl=en

http://blogs.zdnet.com/social/?p=266

http://www.smartmobs.com/2007/09/02/facebook-friending-spam/

Related posts:

1. My first Facebook spam The Belgian Facebook community is growing and I was...
2. Colorbar: belgian spam In the last three days I have received 3 mails...
3. Who knows a spam pigeon? I wrote about the economics of spam earlier: P$...

Although it is an interesting way of visualizing things, and I consider Seth a very bright and creative guy, I am bothered by the fact that the graph is neither clear, correct nor complete.

NOT CLEAR

• I have the impression that the horizontal axis of synchronous/asynchronous in the graph is a fuzzy concept. What is it actually? The average time between the creating of the message and the reception thereof? Or between the sending and the receving of a response? Radio is totally synchronous in its transmission but is very one-to-many: you can’t easily react nor are you expected to. I would like an axis with a unit of measure. Is it expressed in time (seconds/hours/days)? Wouldn’t a measure of one-to-one vs one-to-many be a more appropriate axis?
• Also the bandwidth axis is not clearly defined. Is it something like Kbps/Mbps for 1 individual message? Or is it the average size of 1 message? Is is the bandwidth from the point of view of the creator (writing one Tweet of 140 chars every hour) or that of the consumer (getting 20 Tweets a minute from all your Twitter friends)?

NOT CORRECT

• Why are IM (chatting) and SMS (texting) taken as one? They are different in bandwidth (SMS are shorter and take longer to write) and in synchronicity (chatting is a faster medium: you type with a real keyboard).
• How can you put the whole of ‘art’ as one data point? Theatre? Painting? Music?
• Most of all: what is Twitter doing in that ‘hot spot’ on the right bottom? Twitter is low bandwidth, yes, but not lower than texting, and it is maybe fast but still asynchronous, so should certainly be to the left of IM/chat. It seems like Twitter is there because it would be so cool to have it exactly there.

NOT COMPLETE

• podcasts, as it would be nice to see where to put them compared to ‘talk radio’.
• Skype (conf) call with video?
• Fax/Telex/VHS/DVD
• Email can be one-to-one (like chat but more asynchronous) or one-to-many (newsletter, close to talk radio). Are both uses considered the same?

One can’t post a reply on Seth’s blog, and I’d like the graph to mature a bit. I think that with some better definition of axis and data points it will be  a good way to categorize means of communication. And I’m certainly interested to see what it will look like then.

Related posts:

1. Youtube bandwidth: terabytes per day Youtube seems to be losing some of its early...
2. Your Twitter Quotient (TQ) Something I threw together, just because I could: Twitter...
3. FM Brussel playlist live on Twitter Via Pietel I heard of a Twitter account that publishes...

Let’s Get Lost (1988) is a American documentary film about the turbulent life and career of jazz trumpeter Chet Baker written and directed by Bruce Weber.

I saw Let’s Get Lost in Leuven, I guess around 1990. Chet Baker has been a weak spot for me ever since, because I now knew how much suffering was hiding behind that vulnerable voice. I tried to find a DVD of it but apart from a VHS tape (I don’t have a player) I couldn’t find anything. Then the other day I found the whole movie, split in 13 parts, on Youtube:

Now I could watch them on my PC one after the other, but I wondered if I couldn’t join them and watch them as 1 single movie on my Apple TV. And I managed. Of course, the quality is not comparable to DVD, but it’s something. Here’s the procedure:

• I installed Easy Youtube Video Downloader for Firefox.
• I downloaded the 13 parts one by one. Each file was a 40MB MPEG4 video. The format:
  Input #0, mov,mp4,m4a,3gp,3g2,mj2, from ‘Chet Baker Lets Get Lost 1988 0113.mp4‘:
  Duration: 00:08:21.2, start: 0.000000, bitrate: 628 kb/s
  Stream #0.0(und): Audio: mpeg4aac, 44100 Hz, stereo
  Stream #0.1(und): Video: h264, yuv420p, 480×360, 30.00 tb(r)
• I transcoded each file to a .VOB (MPEG2, DVD format). Each VOB file is about 180MB. For the transcoding I used ffmpeg: ffmpeg -i [INPUT.MP4] -target pal-dvd -y [OUTPUT.VOB]
  The result:
  Input #0, mpeg, from ‘Letsgetlost01.vob‘:
  Duration: 00:08:21.2, start: 0.500000, bitrate: 2734 kb/s
  Stream #0.0[0x1e0]: Video: mpeg2video, yuv420p, 720×576 [PAR 1:1 DAR 5:4], 9000 kb/s, 25.00 tb(r)
  Stream #0.1[0x80]: Audio: liba52, 48000 Hz, stereo, 448 kb/s
• The handy thing with .VOB files is that you can append them into 1 file and they just play in sequence. So I just did copy *.VOB ONEBIGFILE.VOB and this gave me a 2,2GB video file in DVD format.
• I now needed to transcode it again to a format that plays on my AppleTV, so I used Mediacoder to do that.
  The final result: a 525 MB video file, ready for my bedroom TV:
  Input #0, mov,mp4,m4a,3gp,3g2,mj2, from ‘Letsgetlost.mp4‘:
  Duration: 01:54:55.2, start: 0.000000, bitrate: 624 kb/s
  Stream #0.0(und): Video: h264, yuv420p, 640×480, 25.00 tb(r)
  Stream #0.1(und): Audio: mpeg4aac, 48000 Hz, stereo

Now just imagine I could do the following: search for the movie in iTunes, pay for it, let it download and it’s there, 15 min later, on my Apple TV. If it were possible, would I do that? Yes. But the movie industry does not have a solution for the long tail of video, does not want to set up a convenient distribution model for video, certainly not for that funny region called ‘Europe’ and so we need to resort to elaborate and cumbersome methods that, unfortunately, do not make them any money.

The world around the movie companies has changed, the customers have changed, the technology has changed, and if they keep on refusing to adapt, they’ll be like a buggy whip company.

You know, at one time there must’ve been dozens of companies making buggy whips. And I’ll bet the last company around was the one that made the best goddamn buggy whip you ever saw. Now how would you have liked to have been a stockholder in that company?

Larry the Liquidator – Other People’s Money

Related posts:

1. “Lost” in iTunes: good and bad news There’s good news and bad news. First the good:...
2. Create your own iPhone ring tones I’ve had my iPhone for a week (loving it!) and...
3. Screenshots of a DVD with ‘ffmpeg’ I’ve been playing around a lot with video conversion lately...

belgie.popnuuz.com – overzicht van Belgische krantenartikels

Ik heb mijn inspiratie getrokken uit zowel krantenkoppen.be als popurls.com . Je ziet een korte inhoud van het artikel als je over de link gaat met je muis (’mouse-over‘) zodat je beter kan beslissen of je het artikel wil lezen of niet. Er is een splitsing op topics: zowel inhoudelijk (binnenland/buitenland/economie/…) als geografisch (per provincie), en per categorie wordt er een top 50 bijgehouden, alsook een globale top 50. Hoe meer mensen de site gebruiken als nieuwsoverzicht en doorklikken naar artikles, hoe waardevoller de Populaire Artikels in Belgie – belgie.popnuuz.com/pop link wordt.

De bronnen zijn, naast de kranten, ook de tijdschriftten (Knack/Trends) en enkele websites (Clint, Brusselblogt/Gentblogt). De URL laat vermoeden dat er ook een franstalige versie kan komen, en dat is dan ook correct. Ik ben nu nog bezig met het verzamelen van  de juiste RSS feeds daarvoor.

Check het eens uit!

Related posts:

1. Dag van de download Met deze actie willen wij een statement maken: stilstand...

In a sensible world, all ’small’ things would have a mini USB (5V) power connector, all ‘medium’ things would run on 12V DC with 1 (one) standard coax connector and the rest would be on 220V AC. Let’s see how far we are from that situation:

• A USB connection can power up to 500 mA (900 mA in USB 3.0 – wikipedia), although the iPhone  seems to draw up to 1A. So any device that required less than 5W or certainly less than 2.5W, can get all it needs from a USB connector. Why are there then so many GSM and Bluetooth device vendors that insist on using their own proprietary connectors? Samsung, SonyEriccson, LG … I’m looking at you! I remember having at one point 3 different Samsung phones in the house and they all used a different non-compatible power supply. Nokia at least tried to keep the same (coax-like) power connectors until they started making smartphones that needed more power, and they made adaptors with a smaller pin. But Nokia: if Apple can power their iPhones/iPods with USB, then you can do that too.
• Some devices need more power, so there should be standard for 12V too. You can run hard disks, routers, laptops and even desktop computers on only 12V! (”The Google plan calls for a shift from multivoltage power supplies to a single 12-volt standard” – NYTimes 2006). Unfortunately there is no such thing as “the 12V plug”. There are a number of similar but not compatible ‘coax’ plugs around. If there would be a standard for 12V DC devices: you could have a 12V circuit in your home, or at least next to your computer, so that you power all devices with 1 big, efficient transformer. Also, you would have a collection of 12V transformers lying around that you could interchange without thinking. Compare that to having to buy an extra Apple Magsafe adaptor at 90 euro (the Magsafe for Mac Mini: 16.5 V – 3.7 A = 60W!).
  
• If you need more than 60W, you can either take AC or think of some 24V standard.

I know the GSM industry is already talking about it (”The group agreed that by the 1st January 2012, the majority of all new mobile phone models available will support a universal charging connector” – GSMworld). Apparently they want to standardize on Micro-USB. It’s a pity I haven’t seen a lot of devices with Micro-USB yet. I hope we’ll have Mini-USB to Micro-USB dongles so that we can keep on using our ‘old’ power cables.

Micro /mini / USB-B / USB-A female / USB-A male

Related posts:

1. Pimp your laptop: Apple vs Dell Imagine you can walk up to your favourite hardware store...

1. Find a source file

• I typically start from an existing MP3 file. It might be a CD I have ripped to MP3, or a soundtrack from DVDs or other sound bites. I also have a collection of accapella samples that are a nice source.

2. Create the 15 – 30 sec tone in MP3 format

• You don’t need a 5 min ringtone, just 15 to 30 seconds will be enough
• I use Audacity (with the LAME MP3 encoder add-on) to load the full source MP3 file, trim out the piece I want and then add a fade-in and fade-out.

3. Export to MP3

• I then export the file to an MP3 file of 128kbps. You don’t need better quality than that anyway. If you want, you can convert the file to mono here, or it can happen in the next step
• Result: ringtone.mp3

4. Convert with ffmpeg to MPEG4 ringtone

• I prefer using the command-line ffmpeg for transcoding of audio and video.
• The simple way of doing it: ffmpeg -i ringtone.mp3 -y ringtone.m4a (.m4a stands for MPEG4 audio, ffmpeg will see this extension and use default settings for the conversion.) Afterwards you then have to change the extension to .m4r (MPEG4 ringtone).
• The detailed one-step-only way to do this: ffmpeg.exe -i ringtone.mp3 -ac 1 -ab 128000 -f mp4 -acodec libfaac -y ringtone.m4r

5. Open file with iTunes

• Just double-click the file, that should do it.

The lazy way:

let’s make a batch file that will automatically convert the first 30 seconds of any MP3 file into an iPhone ringtone:
SET INPUT=%1
SET NAME=%INPUT:.mp3=%
SET OUTPUT=%NAME%.m4r
echo CONVERT %INPUT% to %OUTPUT% ...
ffmpeg.exe -i %INPUT% -t 30 -ac 1 -ab 128000 -f mp4 -acodec libfaac -genre Ringtone -y %OUTPUT%

Related posts:

1. Imagine: a virtual iPhone for everyone I was downloading a free iPhone app at noon, and...
2. Is that an iPhone in your trousers? Ok, it’s a nice phone, but will all those...
3. My quest for “Let’s get lost” – Chet Baker by Bruce Weber Let’s Get Lost (1988) is a American documentary film...

Click here to view the embedded video.

I know, there are so many ‘funny’ videos you just have to share with your friends. So you send them an email. But for god’s sake, not with a 5MB movie in attachment! For all you know, he/she might not even be able to play that MOV/WMV/XVid movie anyway. Don’t send a movie, send a link!

WHY EMAILING VIDEOS IS BAD

1. Email makes big files bigger
   Binary files (like videos) are encoded, or rather exploded, by your email program (Outlook/Hotmail/Gmail/…) as text-only Base64 MIME attachments. Your 5MB file is transformed into a 6.85MB text file before is sent. Email is a very inefficient way to share videos with several other people.
2. You hurt the recipients
   Your email will have to be downloaded before the recipient can see it. If he is on a slow connection, this might mean 15 minutes of obnoxious delay before he can continue working, start receiving the emails that arrived after your ‘cute puppy’ movie. The movie, if it is not deleted, will add 5 MB of storage to the Inbox. If his Outlook/Exchange quota is 100MB (not uncommon on corporate email systems), you just ate 5% of all the place he has to store contracts, meeting reports and office gossip.
3. You hurt yourself
   By sending a 5MB video, you force your email program to upload a 6.85 MB file to your mail server. If you’re on a basic DSL line, this will easily take up to 10 minutes, during which all your other Internet activity will go very slow. You also add a big chunk to your “Sent Items” folder, bringing you closer to your quota limit.
4. You hurt the Internet
   All those forwarded videos make for a huge amount of unnecessary traffic that eats up bandwidth at ISPs and inspire them to keep prices high. Not that they needed the extra inspiration.
5. It’s force-feeding-video, not video on demand
   You are forcing people to download the whole file before they can decide whether they want to see it now, or ever at all. Youtube and the other sites have a very easy-to-use ‘Send video link’ form that will give the receipient the link, with a screenshot and the description text. Then he/she can decide when, where, how and *IF* to watch the video.
   (Yes, this is less a problem with web-based mail like Gmail or Hotmail)

HOW TO FORWARD A VIDEO LINK

1. public, popular movie
   Don’t think you’re the first one to have seen this movie. Chances are it’s featured on Youtube, Google Video, DailyMotion, Vimeo, in multiple versions (FR subtitles if that’s what you like), in a format everyone can view, available to send as just a link “http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_RgL2MKfWTo“. Less that 50 characters for a full 1:14 of hilarious time loss.
2. private, ’secret’ movie
   Even if you have a movie you recorded/made yourself and want to show only to a limited number of people (”OMG, Britney, you were, like, *so* drunk!!“), then upload it yourself to Youtube, Flickr or Vimeo, put a password on it and send link+ password to those recipients. It will be so much easier for everyone to forward that secret video that no one was supposed to see (”788 views just yesterday? How’s that possible?“).

We thank you.

Related posts:

1. Facebook tricked me into my own spam FAIL So I decided to let Facebook check my Gmail...
2. Youtube bandwidth: terabytes per day Youtube seems to be losing some of its early...
3. Google buys Writely Google has just confirmed to have bought Upstartle, the creators...

All these tips come down to the same: get the fastest shutter times possible while keeping the picture quality acceptable.

#1: take the highest ISO your camera can afford

If you can use sensitivity ISO 800 instead of ISO 100, you’ll win 3 stops. This is the difference between a picture at 1/40 sec (sharp) and 1/5 sec (blurry), certainly with moving targets (and tango dancers do move). Of course there is a trade-off: you loose colour detail.

This is the main reason why you’ll need a camera with a decent sensor, or in other words, an dSLR instead of a regular point-and-shoot camera. Even my 350D gets colour defects at ISO800. When they’re too bad, I tend to convert the pictures to black-and-white or somewhere halfway (by decreasing the saturation).

The camera I’m drooling over now, the Canon 5D Mk II, can take decent pictures at ISO 3200. That’s another 2 stops faster.

#2: take the lightest lens you can afford

You need a lens that will let in a lot of light, that allows you to use maximum aperture. Your standard kit lens that goes from f/5 to f/3.5 probably won’t do. You will need a better lens and it will probably cost some money.

I started with a Canon fixed 50mm f/1.8. Contrary to what I said before, this is a cheap lens (about €100). It’s a great portrait lens, but it is hard to get a tango couple from head to toe in a picture, you’d have to step back too far (50mm on a dSLR is slighty ‘tele’). It’s great for abrazo (embrace) pictures of the upper bodies.

For the last Brussels Tango festival, I bought a Sigma fixed 30mm f/1.4. It’s pricier, heavier but it fits the purpose better. The f/1.4 lets in more light (it’s a 1/3 stop ‘faster’ than a f/1.8) and the 30mm lens (which, on a digital SLR that does not have a full-size sensor, is equivalent to a 45mm lens) allows me to fit people full-length into the frame.

The drawback: with wide aperture, the depth-of-field becomes very narrow. This means: you focus on something e.g. 1.55m away, and every thing closer than 1.40m or further than 1.70m is already blurry. While this is also a feature (it’s a great effect for portraits up close), this means that if your autofocus is just slightly off, everything will be blurry. The error margin is very narrow.

#3: choose Av or Tv mode

Obviously you’re not going to use the standard ‘portrait’ or ‘landscape’ mode. You should go for either aperture priority “Av” or shutter priority “Tv” mode. The first one allows you to always use maximum aperture and get the best shutter speed that you can. The second one would make sure that you use reasonable shutter times for moving subjects (like 1/20 or 1/40 sec).

I prefer using “Av” and fixing the aperture on f/1.4. I take risks with that, because sometimes I end up with pictures with shutter times of 1/10 or 1/5 sec, but with some luck and good timing, they come out OK. It’s just my default “gimme all you got” setting. I don’t use “M” Manual Mode because I don’t have the time before each picture to decide how much aperture/shutter I want.

#4: use autofocus on 1 (central) point

Put your autofocus on 1 point, I use the middle of the frame. This is important because you want to control on what part of your frame your camera tries to focus. You have to force yourself to the following sequence: focus, reframe, shoot. The point on which you focus will be one with the most contrast. It might be an upperarm, where the skin and clothing touch, or the face, or some pattern with contrasting colours on the back. People who are fully dressed in plain black (and there are a lot of those in tango) are very hard to auto-focus on. The framing you use to focus and the actual frame you want to shoot will seldom be the same. So you need to reframe right after focusing. You focus by pushing the shutter button halfway and then you keep it pushed like that while you reframe. When the composition is right, you click all the way and the actual picture is taken.

This is the main reason why people unfamiliar with my camera have a hard time taking acceptable pictures with it. They point at a dancing couple, they push the button all the way immediately, the camera focuses on something in between the two dancers -typically a far away wall- and the shot is unsharp.

#5: underexpose and fix it later

If the 4 tips above still don’t make your shutter times acceptable, try using exposure compensation (the AV+/- button). I sometimes use a full stop of underexposure and I correct it in ‘post’. I use the contrast maximisation in Picasa to stretch the histogram again.

Also, in tango venues, there are a lot of spot lights (to make it cosy). If I focus on a dark part and then reframe to something that includes some of those lights, they might end up clipping part of the picture. When I underexpose, this becomes less of a problem.

The drawback of this method is very similar to using high ISO values: it messes up your colours. So in a lot of cases, you might have to make the picture black and white. But if the moment, the composition was valuable, and the shutter speed was just good enough, you can still end up with a really nice picture.

So how much does this all add up to? If you were to take pictures with a compact camera: f/2.8 lens, ISO 100 and shutter time of 1/30 sec, you need a lighting situation of EV 8 (40%). In my situation, a f/1.4 lens, ISO 800 and the same 1/30s shutter allow me to take pictures in a EV 3 (20%) situation a.k.a. “very dark”. I just won 5 stops. With underexposure, I can go lower still, to EV 2. It makes a lot of difference.

Related posts:

1. Point and shoot badly I went to the concert of Bajofondo Tango Club...
2. New lens for my Canon camera My current favourite lens for my Canon 350D is the...
3. Tangotation: writing tango steps I have been looking for a way to write down...

It’s not a bad widget, but it’s too limited. You can only display “Day/Week/Month/Agenda” style, the colors and fonts are fixed and it does funny stuff for events that continue after 12:00AM (which tango events regularly do, believe me).

I’ve already talked about the fact that iCal is a sissy format and that Gcal needs some more features. I was just thinking that it would be nice if some company would jump on that and provide the whistles and bells for iCal/vCal feeds (like those of Google Calendar), just like Feedburner did with RSS/podcast feeds (and they got bought by Google, so maybe their idea wasn’t half bad). So I introduce the following concept: CalendarBurner (since the Calburner/iCalburner domains are taken).

CalendarBurner

• takes any iCal/vCal feed as input -  can also interpret hCalendar and whatever other calendar format might exist (there must be at least 1 XML based format, right?)
• it knows about Gcal, Upcoming, Apple iCal and other hosted calendar applications
• it can ‘explode’ calendars: convert “every Thursday from X Jan to Y July, but not in May” to N individual events. Calendars where each event is non-repeating are easier to process. (E.g. in Google Calendar, a weekly event that goes on until Dec 14th is interpreted as “inclusive” that Dec 14th date. If you feed that iCal feed into PHPiCalendar, it interprets this repeating event as “before” Dec 14th, so it stops at Dec 7th. With an ‘exploded’ calendar, there is no ambiguity)
• It can visualize a calendar as an IFRAME, with a JS widget, through RSS feeds … and every time fully customisable in colors, fonts, links, order …
• Google Calendar has an RSS feed but this shows the events with the date they were created, not when the actual event takes place. It is one way of showing things, but you also need ‘most recent past events’, ‘next 10 events’ …
• It caches calendar info, so that a particular popular calendar does not crash when consulted by too many people.
• it uses easy URLs: /cal/ATS56GE78SH/rss20 and /cal/ATS56GE78SH/js
• it knows about client applications: when fed into Outlook, iCal, Sunbird, … it uses the features of those programs
• it allows for filtering, tagging, merging … (the “Remix” part of my Get/Remix/Deliver proposal)
• it gives you stats on subscribers, clickthrough, popular events …
• it links with Google Maps
• … (any ideas?)

It would really be nice if some innovative company would jump in this void. With an appropriate freemium model I’m sure it would take off and make calendaring an easier task to do.

Related posts:

1. What Google Agenda currently misses I am using Google Agenda as the central repository for...
2. Creating a tango calendar Resurrection of milonga.be When I started dancing argentine tango, there...
3. Brussels Tango on Google Calendar I’ve started a public Google calendar for tango events (milonga’s,...

• “Turn the beat around – the secret history of disco” by Peter Shapiro
• “Last night a DJ saved my life – the history of the disc jockey” by Bill Brewster and Frank Broughton

Both speak about a phenomenon of the 60’s-70’s: Northern Soul. It is the unlikely emergence of a subculture of English white working-class youths that only danced to American upbeat soul music. It started in Manchester, the Twisted Wheel club and spread from there.

The original northern soul scene lasted from the late 1960s to the early 1980s, and is considered a retrogressive or revivalist movement based on a style of music created years earlier. At the height of its popularity in the 1970s, African American artists had moved on to newer genres such as funk, jazz funk and disco, so the northern soul scene relied on a finite supply of 1960s recordings.

This happened around the time I was born, and I was back here in Belgium so the whole movement kind of escaped my attention. Now why is this important? Because the northern soul was an essential part of the birth of the DJ culture, and contributed to genres like acid jazz, and after that deep house, all of which are near to my heart. Some more influences:

DJ Fatboy Slim from Brighton, England has used a number of samples from northern soul recordings in his music e.g. the use of the guitar riff from “Sliced Tomatoes” by The Just Brothers for his “Rockefeller Skank” single

The British pop and rock artist Paul Weller is an aficionado of black-American music and a keen collector of northern soul 45s. Many of his songs have been musically influenced by northern soul, such as “Beat Surrender”, “Town Called Malice”, “Trans-Global Express” and “The Gift” (by The Jam) and “Solid Bond In Your Heart” (by The Style Council).

Sharleen Spiteri, singer/songwriter and member of the British act Texas is a fan of northern soul music. The Texas song “Black-Eyed Boy” uses a classic driving northern soul backbeat and brass sound.

For the promotional video accompanying their single “Familiar Feeling”, British band Moloko featured a highly authentic recreation of Wigan Casino complete with dancers in period fashion. Lead singer Roisin Murphy is also shown attempting northern soul dancing manouvres.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Edwyn Collins (”A Girl Like You”), Simply Red and Scottish group Belle And Sebastian are amongst many other recording artists who have utilised elements of the northern soul sound in their recordings

Duffy’s single Mercy features dancers performing the spins and flips that are commonly associated with northern soul in the video. The song also has a very northern soul sounding feel to it.

Click here to view the embedded video.

 To hear some Northern Soul music, check the jukebox at www.northernsoul.net.

Related posts:

1. Favourite podcasts: Basic Soul Radio Show I subscribe to less and less podcasts (not enough time...
2. Music for sad days Not that I’m particularly sad today, but I was recently...
3. Afternoon delight For reasons I won’t disclose, I’ve had the following song...