While Gillian has been more in the foreground, David’s contribution as singer, producer and guitarist extraordinaire make the pair into an inseparable whole. Their music is often quiet and introspective but also displays a full range of emotions. I actually find this performance of Caleb Meyer to be frightening in its intensity.

A new project, The David Rawlings Machine, puts the musical emphasis on David’s voice and songwriting. In this short set for the NPR’s Tiny Desk series, Gillian and David perform 4 songs. The first, I’m on My Way Back to the Old Home by Bill Monroe, actually starts out as their sound-check but turns into a full and thrilling version of an old standard.

The sound geek in me notes that this session was recorded with a single microphone and the “mix” we hear is Gillian and David themselves drawing on more than 15 years of performing together. Note too that David’s instrument of choice is the 1935 Epiphone Odyssey arch-top that he plays in both of these clips.

My $.02 on Antennagate. http://bit.ly/cazI0V #

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In a concise 27 pages, Skellie asks and answers the following question:

The Question

How can I get visitors, subscribers, comments, inbound links, and people saying good things about what I do?

The Answer

Evaluate every action, every possible change, and every existing feature of your blog or website, and ask: Is it gripping? Can the reader resonate with it? Does it make it easy (and rewarding) to interact? And most importantly: is it easy (or rewarding) to talk about? That’s all you need to know. Do these things, and you’ll get everything you want.

The remainder of the e-book is devoted to each of these four elements: Gripping, resonating, interacting and talking. Each section includes concrete suggestions for things to try on your website or blog and strategies for evaluating a site you may already have.

The Simple Web philosophy suggests that we simplify our websites by doing and adding things only if they help us to achieve our goals. Skellie suggests that we qualify every action or element of our sites as either +1 or -1. It either grips or distracts, resonates or bores, interacts or preaches, talks or is apathetic. There is little or no neutral ground.

The belief in zero, in certain things being neither one nor the other, and therefore acceptable, causes us to waste time and visitor attention on actions and elements that simply don’t contribute to the growth of your site.

Try evaluating your current site, or the one you are about to build, in this light and you may find it becoming much smaller, simpler and more effective.

Perfection (in design) is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but rather when there is nothing more to take away.
-Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Cross-posted on webdancers.com.

RT @danielday Tonight on ABC: “Silence of the Vuvuzelas.” #WorldCup #

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“My affections were first for my own country, then, generally, for all mankind.” – Thomas Jefferson #

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Cool. The new voice of Google Voice has never done voice over work before. She’s a Google employee. #

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We usually have four or five local farms selling whatever’s fresh, some artisans selling their wares (my son is partial to the rock and gem guy) and a couple of food vendors. The market gets going around 4, the music starts at 6 and the evening wraps up at 8. It’s friendly and local; a cross-section of our entire community.

The musical lineup has something for everyone, from country to rock to swing. Here’s the schedule for the rest of the summer:

This past Wednesday featured the elder statesmen (sorry guys, but it’s true) of our local rock scene, Crazy Ivan. Greg Noll (guitar), Mike Gonzales (bass) and Jim Anderson (drums) clearly loved  playing for a hometown crowd and the feeling was mutual. The video below was shot at another local event, the reopening of The Rock restaurant, in nearby Twain Harte.

If you’re in the area, come join us of a Wednesday evening in the park this summer. You’ll be glad you did.

Tuolumne Park on Google Maps.

Beautiful Beech Staggerwing @ Columbia Fathers Day Fly-in. http://twitgoo.com/14mtde #

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In honor of all the World Cup teams (Go USA!) and their South African hosts, you too can play the Vuvuzela, loud and proud, by clicking on the link below.

Cross posted on webdancers.com.

Email is a peculiar form of communication. We get so much of it that it’s easy to treat it all as junk to be gotten rid of. Of course, the email that we send to others is valuable and should be read and acted upon. Here are seven suggestions for effective email communication, whether you are the sender or the recipient. [Note that these suggestions are for business correspondence. Feel free to ignore them for email to your friends and family, who will love you no matter what.]

1. Use a credible email address.

Like it or not, some people will make judgments about your credibility based on your email address, particularly when you are corresponding as a business. Consider these examples from Modern Nerd:

mrbigshot@freemail.com
What’s that, my good man? You’re a marketing director with a passion for helping iPhone developers breach new and exciting markets, build strong corporate images, and explore and project consistent brand values? And you’ve got a Hotmail address?

johnsmith1988@i-am-not-a-number.com
Look, John, I know that picking usernames has been a lifelong drag, but don’t just tag a number on the end. Especially not your birth year. You’re better than that.

anyone@aol.com
I’ve spent 10 years trying to ditch my asinine prejudice against AOL users, but I still struggle to take aol.com addresses seriously. If you’re an AOL user and you feel hurt by this, I can only apologise and say that I’m trying to grow out of it.

cuddlebunny@pass-me-a-bucket.com
I have a glowing red button on my desk for cutesy addresses like these. Nothing dramatic. It just deletes them.

2. Write short emails

Like most things online, people don’t read emails closely, they skim them. I know that when I open up a long email (anything that I have to scroll through), I immediately ask myself, “can I put this aside and read it later?” I place a high value on concise and direct writing and am much more likely to respond to emails that use it.

If you can’t shorten the text of your email, break it into multiple paragraphs. Large blocks of text are hard to read on a computer monitor and it’s easy to lose the thread of the conversation. Remember your high school english: each new thought or idea should start a new paragraph.

3. Limit your email to a single subject

Closely related to #2, give your recipient a chance to digest and respond to the subject of your message before moving along to a new one. Since many people also use their inbox as a todo list, separating your subjects helps them to organize their work flow and anything we can do to help them with that makes good communication more likely.

4. Make clear requests

Almost all business emails contain something that we’d like the recipient to do. It might be answering a question, taking a specific action or forwarding information to someone else. If the request is buried in the middle of the text or, even worse, thrown in as an aside (“if you get a chance, you might send this on to Bill”), it’s much less likely to be acted on. A good technique is to summarize at the end of the email, using a numbered or bulleted list, the actions you would like the recipient to take. If you want them to let you know when they have taken those actions, list that too.

5. Honor requests from others

Here, I have to rant a little. When you ignore a direct request in an email, it affects your trustworthiness and reputation. At least for me it does. Ignoring a request says to me that either a) you didn’t hear me or b) that you didn’t value my request enough to respond to it. Either way, it’s a huge roadblock to effective communication.

I know everyone’s busy and has lots of requests that they have to attend to and I’m not suggesting that every request must be handled immediately. I am suggesting that every one has to be acknowledged, if only to say “I’ll get back to you on that” (provided that you do).

6. Acknowledge receipt of emails

Sometimes spam filters get a little carried away and emails fall into a big black hole in the ether. In almost all cases, the only way for the sender to know that an email has been received is by getting an email back from the recipient. Let your sender know that you’ve gotten their email (maybe even thank them for it), even if you aren’t able to respond to it right away. People expect a business to respond within 24 hours and will start to feel ignored beyond that.

7. Don’t write for yourself, write for your reader

This is another way of saying, consider your audience. Make sure that you include the things they need to know to make sense of your correspondence.

• Make use of text links to provide them with background information (these also help keep your email short).
• Stay away from jargon, unless you’re writing to someone who knows the jargon, in which case it can be a useful shorthand.
• Use inline or attached images sparingly and only where they can help illustrate your points.
• Use emoticons (sparingly) if you’re worried that your tone might be misinterpreted.
• Put yourself in the reader’s place as ask yourself, “what would I need to know in order to understand this?”

Finally, be nice and remember that everything you send over the Internet might someday be made public.

Photo by Rupert Ganzer.
Cross posted on webdancers.com.