iTunes gives you a thirty second sample of a song. But who can tell from thirty seconds if it’s a song they want to buy? iTunes is not the place to find new music, and it definitely does not help people who are just starting out.

Bandcamp is the place for that. Their philosophy is: you can’t sell your music if nobody has heard it. The header from their website gives a great description: “Viral distribution. We give your fans drop dead easy tools to share your music with their friends, and most importantly we do it in a way that drives traffic back to you.”

On Bandcamp, everything is free. You enter your username, email, and bandname. Then you upload songs. Every song can be listened to in full, in high quality, for free. Then, you can sell your songs in any format (Bandcamp does it for you) at whatever price you want. Bandcamp makes spreading and selling your songs very simple.

This is definitely a great resource for independent musicians trying to get into the music industry. Every other creative medium has a way of getting itself out: vloggers have YouTube; bloggers have Tumblr, Blogspot, etc.; photographers have Flickr; artists have Deviantart… Musicians didn’t have anything until Bandcamp.

IMeem

I would just like to take a moment to mourn the loss of a great friend… *ahem* I mean website…

IMeem was kind to all. It gave everyone the opportunity to listen to anything that anyone else uploaded. It didn’t discriminate; it didn’t force you to have a membership. Its music search engine was fabulous, and its interface was sleek. IMeem was the best free online music player around.

But then it sold out to Myspace, and Myspace changed everything. The sleek interface was replaced by Myspace’s slow, clunky one. Songs are no longer uploaded from everywhere, but gathered from Myspace music players – that means no more rare songs, no more covers. The playlists are supposed to be up in a few days, but who knows what’s changed about them.

Why did IMeem sell out? It had a good thing going. It was becoming big. It could have made it on its own. Why did it sell out so soon? Oh IMeem, didn’t you know? The way to sell a website is to wait until it becomes big enough to stand alone. Wait until it is popular enough that when you sell it, nothing will change. And if you were forcdd to sell out due to copyright violations, you should have known better.

Oh, IMeem. You were a great website. You are already missed.

This Is Not Tom

..........Hello?

Hello...........

..........Uhh... is this Tom?

No, I'm afraid this is not Tom...........

..........Ok, thanks. Sorry to bother you. I'll keep looking.

*click*

All across the internet, this is dialogue occurs between the curious viewers of Thisisnottom.com and their Google search results pages. Thousands of people are trying to figure out the extremely difficult riddles that are posted there. This is what appears on the first page of Thisisnottom.com.

I, myself, have only gotten through this one. It took surprisingly long, and as with any riddle, it seemed completely easy once I figured it out.

Riddles, of course, have been around for ages. But they haven't been on the internet for even just two decades. Having riddles on the internet opens up so many new options. Answers to the riddles can be hidden in hyperlinks anywhere on the site. They can be typed into URL's. They can be entered as passwords. There are many ways of submitting an answer to a riddle, and there are even more ways of finding out the answers to riddles. In the past, the only way to figure out a riddle was to use logic or otherwise your own mind. Online riddles can do this, and they can also use the internet as a massive database of knowledge, allowing for riddles that involve a little bit of trivia. Online riddles open up an entire new aspect of riddling.

Nerdfighters

 Over two years, John and Hank Green have accumulated a fairly massive following of people. These people, mostly teenagers, are made up of fans of their vlogs and fans of John's books (and the two have, of course, influenced each other).

To manage this fan base and to stay connected with them better, they created the Nerdfighter Ning. This is a social networking website that is made for all fans of John and Hank Green who wish to consider themselves Nerdfighters (the term nerdfighter is the title of a videogame that Hank found one day).


This is all good, and is to be expected of a tech-savvy author and his brother. But what is amazing is how loyal this fan base is, and how powerful and broad it is. There are Nerdfighters in places all over the world and all over the internet. Many of them are YouTubers, posting vlogs and/or songs. And as a general rule, Nerdfighters are excited about other Nerdfighters and Nerdfighteria (stuff that relates to Nerdfighting and/or is "Awesome").

Because they are such a massive group of people, Nerdfighters can accomplish much, in the same way that the massive group collaborated to make "I've Got Nothing" (in fact, they may have been a part of it. Their YouTube followers merge a bit). John and Hank Green's Nerdfighters work to bring Awesome to the world.

They are great because they are a silly, young-at-heart, adventurous group. They see the world differently, and they are ambitious and passionate. They are the kind of people who make other generations proud of this generation of teenagers. I believe the Nerdfighters will change the world into a better place.

TinEye

Logos are great, and so are popular posters or ads - anything that is very well-known.

It is best at finding manipulations of very common images or photo - ones that are similar to the original, but that have been changed in some way.

You provide a photo, by upload or URL, and it finds images that are similar.

TinEye is a reverse image search.

TinEye works great for finding spoofs of images, different sizes of images, and just edited images. It usually has several pages-worth of findings, and the beginning ones are usually resized images; the later ones are the edits and spoofs.

The only problem is that it doesn't work very well yet. I tried about six images before I got one that it was able to find. It is apparently either very finicky and precise, or its database is currently just too small.

If it worked well enough, this would be a fantastic resource for finding all kinds of images. I hope they continue adding to their database so that less popular images can be found. But as it is, TinEye is still a good resource for finding spoofs of very popular images. It's good for at least that - but hey, it's only in beta testing.

IndieFeed

IndieFeed is a simple website. Each day of the week it posts a full length song in one of six genres. Sunday is alt rock, Monday is indie pop, Tuesday is hip hop, and so on. They take Saturdays off.

Its music player is simple. The page flips through each song silently by genre until you scroll over it or click to play. The player flips through the artwork that goes along with the album and also gives a short description of the song. And at the end of each song is a short, but informative review of the band in general. Each song is also available for free download, and most of the songs are archived.


IndieFeed is a spontaneous way to find new music. It is not a good way to find tons of new bands - TasteKid is better for that. But it is a great way to get a steady input of new music. It's gives a very filtered selection, so it's great if you don't have a lot of time. Also, IndieFeed accepts submissions, so you are very likely to hear something brilliant that isn't anywhere else simply because it isn't well known. IndieFeed is a fun website to visit every day, just to hear what's new.

Letter Playground

At LetterPlayground, users have created artistic representations of letters and numbers and posted them. Then other users can leave comments, create a list of favorites, et cetera. LetterPlayground is designed for typographic designers and for people who think creatively about the symbols they are surrounded with.

One interesting feature of LetterPlayground is the Letter Count, which graphs the amount of letters being submitted.
Another interesting feature is that LetterPlayground gives the statistical proportion of its members' occupations in a nice simple pie chart. Pie Charts are a great way to visualize large amounts of information.

LetterPlayground is interesting because it opens up a new side of typography. It allows people to really play with letters and numbers in a way they probably haven't done since watching Sesame Street as a child.

Photo from Flickr

It reminds me of the playfulness of the giant letters on the grounds of the Indianapolis Museum of Art. That's a literal letter playground. This is a figurative one.

TasteKid

You've got good TasteKid.

There's not much to say about this website because there aren't a lot of features. But the feature that it does have is really amazing. TasteKid is an extremely comprehensive band, book, and movie recommender.

That's exactly what it does - it recommends things.

Based on the band names, books, or movies you enter, Emmy (the kid who has good taste) tells you what you might and probably will like. You type in a few bands and it gives you a few dozen. And if you search a book or movie, it cross-recommends to give you answers for all three categories (and sometimes even TV shows).
What's really exciting about TasteKid is that its recommendations are exactly what you would want them to be. It's as if you had asked a close friend to recommend you something.

To top it off, you can add it as a search engine in your browser.

Pitchfork

Pitchfork is a website that acts as a resource for finding out about new bands and old bands. It's very informative and has great features. Pitchfork has a huge list of musicians, who are mostly indie artists, that it follows. It connects people to news, reviews, tour dates, and releases.

Pitchfork is an awesome way to find new musicians, because it has a tab at the top that is devoted to just that. It gives the top ten new albums and the top ten new tracks, and it updates frequently.

This website also writes great reviews of its artists. They are short and to the point, so the reader can get a very good idea of what the album or track being reviewed will sound like.

Pitchfork's news feature informs people of announced tourdates in a very helpful way. All the artists with upcoming tours are listed on one page, and when clicked, the tourdates pop down conveniently.It also has a simple list of the top tracks and albums from other music sources. Their podcast, Forkcast, gives full length songs several times a day.

Glogster

Ok, so it's glog, like blog, and it ends in ster, like hipster... and I guess the letter "g" is pretty hip... right? Hmm. It sounds like some kind of emo playground... like some place all the hipsters might go to get their self-documenting fix in for the day...

Oh... it is.

At Glogster, people can make digital posters, using photos they've taken themselves or are borrowing from the internet, and then add graphics, text, sounds, and even videos. But this website is simultaneously great and terrible.

a glog by user mizzy1219

Some of the content on this site is demoralizing, and the website just opens a forum for this kind of content. The posters it produces look childish and are only occasionally visually interesting. This website is clearly made for emotionally unstable hipsters who follow the crowd and claim to be unique. Glogster is feeding an insecure, mislead generation.


However, from a design standpoint there isn't much wrong with this website. It has decent maneuverability, and it has a fun look to it. And creating a glog is surprisingly simple.

But the lesson to be learned from this is, when you make a website, make sure it lifts up the standards of a generation instead of bringing them down. Users use this website to document their lives and the way they think, but it also goes the other way. The website was made because of the way this group of people lives. I have seen a lot of "emo" stuff online, but I have never seen anything sink this low. This website is both a reaction and a cause of trend-following and insecurity, which can only continue to pull the generation down.

If I ever design a website, I will be sure to never let create a downward cycle with its audience.
It's web-design ethics: make the product beneficial, not just enjoyable and money-making.

Pipl

It's always being talked about somewhere, how people can find out so much information about people by looking at their internet activities and profiles. The most common sources are Myspace and Facebook. And most of this searching is done through Google, Yahoo, or Bing.

I know you've Googled yourself. Don't even pretend you haven't, dear reader.
Sometimes it yields good information about you (for instance, I once found myself mentioned in a blog by Jill Long Thompson when she was running for Governor). But often times, it doesn't.

But Pipl.com does.

This website runs a thorough search of people on the internet. It can search for people by name, email, username, phone, or business, and the results it finds are extensive. It shows people's addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, background reports, personal profiles, business links, public records, publications, photos, web pages, blog posts, documents, and gives quick facts about a person.

That's a lot of information. Pipl really does have a thorough search. More props to how well this search engine works: I have always been very hard to Google, because there is an author with my same name, and I have a very common name. But Pipl.com found me.


This is a ton of fun to play with, but actually, it's quite frightening. Pipl does such a good job searching, that hardly anything is left private. If Pipl gets too well-known, it could lead to another outbreak of identity theft. Or it could be used as a stalker resource.

Or it could be the tool that makes people more aware of internet security. It could increase people's security by making them more careful what they put online. And it really could be a great resource for employers to find out about potential employees.

Next time you feel the urge to Google yourself, Pipl yourself instead.
Find out just how much about you is available to everybody.

Kuler

Kuler.adobe.com
It's got it in the name, so it's got to be cool, right?
Fantastic is what this website is.This website takes a photo and turns it into a color scheme. Each scheme has five colors in it and can be narrowed by mood: Colorful, Bright, Muted, Deep, or Dark. Images can be uploaded from your computer, or they can be pulled from Flickr.
Color schemes can also be edited or created from scratch. In the editor, numbers are given for each color in HSV, RGB, CMYK, LAB, and HEX (this can be very helpful for people designing or personalizing websites). Members are allowed to save their schemes.But that's not all this website does. It also has a tab called Pulse, which tracks the most common colors in color schemes. Sliders let you control the Granularity and Brightness of the data you are seeing.
Other than just being an awesome resource, this website is well designed. Black is a great color for figuring out colors, and the website is kept clean and simple. It is extremely easy to navigate and figure out. This is one of the best websites I've ever come across.

Tailcast

Tailcast is a website made for artists, writers, and musicians.
It allows people to share their pieces for free or for sale, and it gives them a place to form community with each other. It allows for drawings, paintings, sculptures, photos, and other artistic mediums; for poetry, short stories, and passing thoughts; and for musical works in progress or full compositions.
It creates a space open to collaboration by allowing people to leave comments on other people's posts. Each post is put on the website itself, and each member has a page to themselves, where they can share things about themselves and have conversations with other members.

Essentially, it's a combination of Facebook and Deviantart.
But it works well. It's small enough that nothing has gotten out of hand, but it's large enough that it has a good flow of artists. And its friendly, clean, bright layout makes it a happy, trendy place for people to visit. I think that Tailcast will do very well in the webworld, at least well enough for its creators to make a decent profit.

Gangplank

Gangplank is a website that urges people to work toward building a new and better economy. It supports the environment, sustainability, and the community in much the same way as Bill McKibben's book Deep Economy, which is the common theme book at IUPUI for the next two years.


It has a good message. It has great goals. The website is set up to support events, which is a good feature. It is innovative in that it teams up with local artists and musicians to get credit. It works to get people informed and involved in changing the community, the economy, and the environment.


But something about its design just doesn't make sense. It's not the dark look of the website - it's perfectly find to steer away from the typical "green" look. It's not the nautical theme. It's that the main font is cartoonish. And at the same time, the website's logo is a skull. It's all right to go against the typical look, but at least pick just one direction.































Design can break rules and boundaries, but it should not break consistency. It's true that the skull looks cartoonish, like the font, and that the skull matches with the nautical (and possibly pirate-like) theme. But the font looks like something out of a bubble gum ad. I would make the font match with the rest of the site.

IllustrationMundo

IllustrationMundo is a website that connects illustrators to other illustrators, or just artists to artists. It's an easy way for people to get connected to other people's creative work. It features illustrators that are particularly good, illustrations that have recently been added and commented on, articles about site members' work, polls, forums, and questions for pros.

What's interesting is that each person's work is not uploaded onto IllustrationMundo itself. Each time a person's work is mentioned, it links to their own website. It makes IllustrationMundo into a resource for connection, rather than a means of presentation.

IllustrationMundo is a great resource for people wanting to build their professional careers as well as people wanting to get started or to be more informed about being an illustrator. It's a really great way for people to connect to others, build their networks, and offer each other good critique.