social networks

8hands Featured Geek Anthem: Gotta Digg

alon — Mon, 24 Dec 2007 07:40:27 -0500

We have to pause all of our festive Christmas celebrations for what seems to be the song of the moment, "Gotta Digg" by Kina Grannis.

We can't grantee that you'll find Grannis a musical genius – she's cute, but even you DIY low-fi fanatics won't claim her to be to the next Regina Spektor. What we can do for you is promise that you'll get a good laugh, and maybe even hum the song for a bit. After all, you gotta digg – when you're done, you can go back and enjoy your Christmas!

8hands Featured Good Deeds: Project Opus & Arctic

Alice — Sun, 14 Oct 2007 05:07:14 -0400

It's common knowledge that if someone wants a place in heaven in his next life, he should do good deeds in his current one. It's a stressful thought, and that's why I'm so relieved that I don't believe in heaven or in hell. Lucky me.

Today, I would like to tell you about 2 good things I've heard about. The kind of things that fools you to thinks that there are great men out there, and that humanity is good by its nature.

Project Opus is a community; dare I say a social network, that is so into good music that its entire purpose is to help new unknown musicians. If you register as an artist, project opus will provide you a free website where you can upload your music and photos, publish your upcoming shows and get people to know you and become your "fans". It's nice to know there are people who don't blindly count on music labels to sign all great musicians and actually doing something about it. In my moral standards, it's a non selfish, giving and wonderful idea and the people behind its execution should definitely go to heaven. If any of you like to discover new music for themselves, join the community and start tracking down music you like.

Arctic. Don't call them monkeys!

To show you that Project opus is worth checking out, I got Arctic to back me up. Arctic started as a solo project of Marcus Martin, and became a three man band when the other two members fell in love with Marcus's project and asked to take part in it. Marcus, Arctic's leader, comes from the arctic region of Canada as implied by the name of his project and you can almost feel the cold weather when listening to his music. I love listening to music that uncovers the circumstances in which it was written and I think this could be the main thing that makes Arctic's music as beautiful as it is.

Though the cold weather definitely influenced Martin, his relationship with the arctic region of the earth doesn't come down to influence. Martin is so attached to the land he grew up on that the Master CD of the EP was sold in an auction to the highest bidder and half of the income went to World Wildlife Fund, supporting their goal and helping the northern land. Did I or did I not say that I'll tell you two stories that will make you believe in humanity again?

Marcus Martin actually not once said "I think it's hard not to be an environmentalist, growing up on the land." Well, I did grow up on land, and I'm far from being an environmentalist, but if Marcus thinks it'll buy him a place in heaven, it's fine by me.

8hands Featured Project: A.N.A

Goldi — Mon, 20 Aug 2007 11:17:28 -0400

A.N.A represent: A new collective of artists, who wish to confront with the hierarchic structure of MySpace

Like in real life, social networks also contain activists and revolutionists that operates among MySpace and other social networks.

A lovely and inspiring profile is the A.N.A project, which is acting under the banner of collaboration structure as appose to the My My My structure (My Profile, My Videos, My Pictures, MySpace etc.). What the hell does that mean, you ask?

The A.N.A profile is a shared user and password page with a unique collection of random artists and musicians when everyone can add their Two cents to the profile. You can send photos, videos and songs.

There's also the "Contribution Window" – songs and music available for download at high quality (192 kbps mp3s), especially made for independent movie makers, animators, choreographers, performance-art, etc... (Approved by the artists of course).

The mp3 player is a mini radio station where everyone can join the playlist: "All music in our player has been approved by the artists themselves. Thanks to that we're playing most of it at 128kbps bit rate and sample rate of 44kHz (instead of 96kbps and 22kHz, - as at the regular 4 songs player)."

The open clip project is a one clip build out of random pictures that were sent to the profile.

Personally we find it very cool and inspiring. If you wish to join the project feel free to send an email to: art.net.activist (at) gmail.com

Good Luck!

8hands is starting to explore favorite social networks to find you the best music ever made!

alon — Sun, 22 Jul 2007 07:27:43 -0400

We'll start off with a confession: all of us at the 8hands mega-team are obsessed with music. Actually, we have two obsessions – music & social networks. It's understandable because music is one of the reasons that social networks are so exciting – From the greatness of the imeem player to the brilliant last.fm radio. Hell, MySpace alone holds about 3 million unsigned artists, so you can browse around for days looking for the "next big band" (and when they go commercial you'll be able to say that you loved them from the get-go, but now they suck).

We were always looking for a way to combine 8hands with our love of music. Guess what? We found one! We are starting this new music blog to tell you all about the great artists that we've found around the social networks sphere (mostly in MySpace, Last.fm, imeem & Bebo) and we'll use 8hands to spread the word & share favorite music videos with all of the 8hands users.

Almost on a daily basis, we'll post a recommendation about a not-too-big artist or band that is either unsigned or signed to a small indie label. We'll write about music creators that we believe use social networks as a huge promotion tool, and we will use 8hands promotion values to help our favorite artists of the bunch.

We'll recommend artists, post interviews, videos & songs and explore the mutual relationship between the indie culture to the networks. Every week or so we will choose our favorite artist of the moment and upload a music video by him to our YouTube profile.

As you probably know (and if you don't – go download 8hands right now you lazy un-adventurers people!) the 8hands YouTube videos come built-in in 8hands, so, unless you've deleted that location you'll get every video right into your 8hands!

That's great for the artists, because their videos will be exposed to many people, and it's amazing to the 8hands users, because, if they appreciate our taste in music (which we believe is superb) they will be able to discover new artists & share them with their friends by a simple drag & drop.

So… add the music blog's rss to your 8hands, and if there are any artists that fit the description above and you would like us to recommend them here, we would love it if you'll comment or write us to info (at) 8hands (dot) com.