All Hail Helvetica

It’s the font Helvetica’s 50 birthday. MOMA has mounted an exhibit featuring posters and graphics proving the font is, well, everywhere. Here is a very good web essay from Slate on the origins and lasting popularity of Helvetica. It even includes the subtle differences between Helvetica and the interloper Arial. What? You didn’t know there was a difference? Now you do. Designer Mark Simonson explains everything .

I love using Helvetica because it looks clean and modern and is legible at any size. It really reads well on a web page although writers seem to lean more toward a serif type.

Can’t get enough? There’s a new documentary entitled – what else – Helvetica.

THX, M1Live.com

According to Shoutcast me and about 1200 other people are listening to the waining hours of M1live.com, at least in it's current incarnation. I know that number will rise as we approach midnite of what founder Rich Cowell has entitled "The Last Dance."

And that's too bad. M1live.com presents a mix of dance that no other dance-oriented internet radio station does right now. It's New York club with a definite European feel. M1live certainly provided a music home for me at home and at work, especially after the demise of Party 93.1 in Miami, one of the few commercial broadcast stations playing dance music in the US.

Although Party 93.1 was certainly limited in playlist, it's mere existence, along with a handful of stations like Energy 92.7 in San Francisco at least kept the dance flag planted on the broadcast map.

Dance music lives well on the internet, which makes M1live all the more valuable. As the current battle over licensing fees throws the US based portion of the internet radio world into limbo this lovely little niche of the web has become most vulnerable.

So thank you, Rich. Here's to you working out what it will take to bring back m1live.com in it's next form.

And in the meantime, click on the link below to learn more about American Net Radio's imperilled future:



If the US manages to kill of its internet radio, there are lots of great European and Australian based internet stations with a dance/trance/house formats. I already have some bookmarked ...

Obama's MySpace Storylet

Obama Campaign Asks: Is It MySpace or Yours?
Thursday, May 3, 2007; Page A04
The Washington Post

In the first MySpace skirmish of the 2008 presidential race, no one's come out looking good. Not MySpace, the popular social networking site. Not Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.), who until earlier this week had more "friends" on the site -- about 160,000 -- than almost all the other candidates combined. Not Joe Anthony, the 29-year-old paralegal who created a MySpace fan page that carried Obama's name.

In November 2004, after hearing Obama's keynote speech at the Democratic National Convention, Anthony began adding friends to his Obama page. By the time Obama announced his candidacy earlier this year, he had about 30,000 friends. When MySpace started its Impact Channel as the central hub of its candidate profiles two months ago, Obama's camp used Anthony's page as its official MySpace page. For weeks, Anthony worked with Obama's online team as the senator continued to attract more friends.

Read the full Washington Post story here

Only the participants know for sure, but it seems this could have been worked out before it became a storylet with 368 news stories linking from Google News.

Whoever is at fault, the Obama Team should have formalized their deal earlier on with Mr. Anthony. They could have employed him or negotiated a buyout to compensate him for his work. Although MySpace isn’t exactly a traditional direct mail mailing list there was the potential of 160,000 “good names” there. That’s tough to rebuild.

However I do have a problem with Mr. Anthony building the MySpace page as a voluntary effort and then asking to be compensated to show “he wouldn’t be bullied.” And if 130,000 “friends” signed on after Senator Obama announced, how much did Mr. Anthony contribute?

“We wanted to work with Joe. But at the end of the day, this page is bigger than him," said campaign spokeswoman Jen Psaki.

I cringed a little at that one. No, the page is not bigger than the volunteer even if he is being uncooperative. Work it out, avoid the story, keep the 160,000 contacts.

Of course, the name belongs to and should be the property of the candidate. I just can’t help but think they could have gotten to a resolution a little more elegantly.

PS If the primary were held today, Sen. Obama would most likely have my vote.