So here are the runners up in no particular order…

Runner Up: Michael Korchia – But I feel alright when you smile…

Runner up: Paul Schuster – Eichler won’t even look at the biscuit

Runner up: Rocío Ortiz García – Maybe I should just change my style, but, when he smiles, I feel alright

2010 winner 'No bigger than a nickel' by Ro

Back in 2008 I launched a new competition for art about or inspired by Galaxie 500′s track Fourth of July. The first year was met with embarrassing silence and a grand total of zero entries. For 2009 I decided that the lack of a prize may have contributed to the competition’s pathetic failure and decided to offload some duplicate CDs to the winning entry… and sure enough egged on by some of my off-casts the number of entries soared and the competiton was so fierce that in the end I made both entries winners!

So… welcome to year 3 of the AHFoW Fourth of July contest. The winning piece of art will, once again win a collection of crap that I have around that will probably include a couple of CDs and anything else I may be able to rustle up between now and then [prize donors welcome].

The Rules

Create a piece of art about or inspired by the Galaxie 500 song The Fourth of July so, for example, it could be…

• Poems about dog biscuits
• Photos of poems on dog biscuits
• Photos of small Empire State Buildings…
• … or large nickels

The lyrics are in the database and the song is in a million places on the internet – go hunt it down… and let your imagination run wild.

If entries are so copious that I have to categorise them they will fall into two broad categories…

• Visual art (e.g. paintings, drawings, photographs, sculptures, videos)
• Everything else (e.g. poems, stories, songs)

The winner will be chosen by me and my family and will be based on a number of criteria, most of which will have more to do with what makes us laugh (or cry) than jaw-dropping artistic-brilliance (although that would be appreciated too of course). It’s just for a laugh so have some fun.

Entries in email, or as links to web sites (e.g. blogs/Flickr/YouTube etc.) or in the comments here if you prefer!

Competition closes on 3rd July and winners will be announced on the 4th.

So…

For all the Galaxie 500, Luna, Damon & Naomi, Dean & Britta and everything else related follow @ahfow

For all the above PLUS me rabbitting on about cycling; being cold and old; what I'm listening to; what I'm watching and anything else that pops into the randomness of my head then you should follow @grange85

Posted via email from AHFoW (slight return)

Posted via email from A Head Full of Wishes

A List Full of Wishes: The Galaxie 500 Mailing List

Come and join. The list will be 15 years old this summer.

A quick summary for those of you who just want headlines…

• Galaxie 500 album: On Fire
• Galaxie 500 track: Tugboat
• Luna album: Penthouse
• Luna track: 23 Minutes in Brussels
• Damon & Naomi album: More Sad Hits
• Damon & Naomi track: This Car Climbed Mt Washington
• Dean & Britta album: L’Avventura
• Dean & Britta track: Night Nurse

Thanks to everyone who voted and to all the folk who used the comments field to say such nice things about A Head Full of Wishes…I do it for my own sad satisfaction but if I were to need justification for the insane amount of time I waste/spend on it then I know I can find it.

Have a great Christmas if you care, or a great whatever you do care about if you don’t

-=Andy=-

If you need inspiration or are just interested in the numbers you can see previous surveys going back to 1995 on A Head Full of Wishes.

Anyone who has already voted but didn’t leave an email address for the draw (because I haven’t mentioned it before – sorry) just email me.

The review and rating will be extended to shows so you can write short “I was there” posts about and let other users know just what they missed.

I’ll be adding new features during the trial and any suggestions would be very much appreciated, either leave a comment or email me.

I’ll probably let it run for three or four weeks (or when the form-filling dries up) so expect results shortly before xmas.

If you need some inspiration feel free to peruse last year’s Survey results and previous surveys back until 1995!

PLEASE SPREAD THE WORD as last years turnout was the lowest for many years…

Take the A Head Full of Wishes survey

• A Head Full of Wishes – news, articles, reviews and a comprehensive database of releases, tracks, shows and setlists.
• AHFoW – Facebook group (new)
• AHFoW – Flickr group
• AHFoW – Last.fm group
• AHFoW – Ning social network
• AHFoW – YouTube group (not that anyone EVER uses a YouTube group)
• AHFoW – Twine (even I’d forgotten about this but now that Twine is out of private beta I suppose it might kick off)
• AHFoW – MySpace (really the official Galaxie 500 MySpace page)
• follow AHFoW on Twitter

You can find me in all of those places so give me a shout if you haven’t already – and if there’s anywhere else I ought to be please let me know.

I’ve decided that the current Oblivious forum isn’t working and am trying a different angle. So as of about now Oblivious the forum no longer exists – but Oblivious the “social network” is born – please come and sign up.

My apologies to you all for the change, particularly to the one new member who only signed up a day or two back! (if you prefer there is also the Galaxie 500 Mailing List – 13 years old and counting)

Read on for a more detailed explanation of my decision…

The long version…

Here are some statistics…

In the 121 days that the forum has existed there have been 52 posts by 26 registered users – 19 of which were by me, so if we take me out of the pot that works out at just under one post every 4 days – take away the initial flurry of usage and things look even more miserable. Based on this and my dislike for the forum software (phpBB), I’ve decided that the time has come to dismiss another attempt at community as a failure. I’d like to thank all of you who gave it a go for taking a shot at it.

I may be a quitter, but I’m also bizarrely persistent so rather than toning down my ambitions I’ve decided to go the other way and have a shot at a full on social network – A Head Full of Wishes’ own Facebook or MySpace if you will. I’m using a third party set-up called Ning which seems reasonably mature and capable.

I suspect that maybe the problem is that there just isn’t too much desire for an online community based around such a niche as AHFoW is but I thought I’d take a crack at it anyway.

If you have already signed up for another Ning network you can log-in using the same username/password – otherwise follow this link and join me and see if we can make something out of this.

Thanks again for trying and I look forward to seeing you on Oblivious (alternate version)

(Near-)Instant gratification can also be achieved via RSS and Email…

It’s been a few years since I last tried to get an online forum going for A Head Full of Wishes and I thought it was time to try again. The Galaxie 500 Mailing List has been a bit quiet of late, maybe that’s because things are just quiet or maybe it’s because mailing lists are so 20th century and people would much prefer to do things in their web browser – I suppose this is where we find out.

For starters I’ve created three forums one for “on topic”, one for “off topic” and one for “tech stuff” – I was tempted to go with just one forum for everything as it seemed a bit silly to spread what may be a rather quiet enterprise thinner than necessary but I am aware that there have been list users in the past who find the off-topic posting a bit frustrating so we’ll go with this and see how things pan out.

This is an out of the box installation of phpBB and as such it is packed with “features” that probably need turning off or tweaking, if you do find anything that bothers you or that could be better please post it in the “tech stuff” forum.

Please come and join us at Oblivious – The new online forum for A Head Full of Wishes

This is a really long and tedious post about managing links and tagging and it exists only as a reference and because I think really ought to document this sort of thing so that my grandchildren will be able to see just how truly, truly sad their granddad was . Unless the very un-rock’n'roll subject of managing information is your thing I suggest you should probably not read on…

Over the years one of the things I’ve failed to get under control is keeping track of what’s on the Internet that could be of interest to visitors to A Head Full of Wishes. In the past I’ve tried to build a links system into the database (that got too unwieldy too quickly) and tried to use the Open Directory Project (which was (rightfully) too restrictive in what I could add). About three years ago I started using the social bookmarking site delicious to try and keep track of things but my efforts where ill-conceived and half-hearted. Things have got better in the last couple of years but I would tag things and the last few would show up on the AHFoW home page but once they drifted off the bottom they were pretty much lost.

A year or so back I pinched last.fm‘s tactic of enabling users to tag photos on Flickr so that the photos of a specific event could be pulled into that events page on last.fm. So AHFoW users (actually mostly me) could tag their Flickr photos of a Dean & Britta or Damon & Naomi gig and have them show up on this website. In order to do this each gig was given an event ID (actually it already had one in the database) and a tag was constructed using the namespace:precdicate=value syntax that Flickr calls a “machine tag” and has been used to geotag photos and is what last.fm uses for its system.

It occurred to me recently that a similar system could be used in delicious to keep track of other relevant things on the Internet, not just photos but plog posts, reviews, interviews and videos – in fact anything relevant with a URL could be tagged and traceable. Each event already had a suitable tag (from the Flickr system) but I decided to extend this to include every artist, track and album.

So now a video on YouTube of Galaxie 500 playing Tugboat at the Commonwealth School in Boston would live in three places on A Head Full of Wishes…

• A list of Galaxie 500 bookmarks.
• A list of Tugboat bookmarks which could also include blog posts about the song, other videos, YouTube users cover versions etc.
• A list of bookmarks specific to that event which could collect links to vidoes, music, reviews, photos of the gig.

And added to that there are all the “proper” tags that I and any other delicious user can add to an item. Everything has a place and most things have more than one place – this is an attempt to embrace what David Weinberger’s Everything Is Miscellaneous calls the third order of order.

Another potential benefit of the system is that I could make use of A Head Full of Wishes visitors to help me keep track of what’s out there – anyone can add the Tugboat tag to a relevant website and AHFoW will find it. Unfortunately the nature of the tags makes them not very intuitive – it’s not easy to remember that the tag for Tugboat is ahfow:trackid=9 so I suspect that not too many visitors are likely to be helping out.

The three (other) down-sides to the system (that I’m aware of) are…

• Firstly one that has plagued any similar system in the past that of broken links – websites change or vanish and along with them goes the content either gone forever or lost. Sadly I think that there’s no way around this and making use of social bookmarking site means that even vigilance on my part wouldn’t necessarily be able to keep the tags clean of broken links.
• Secondly, the system is open to abuse, anyone can use the tags and if anyone can tag a site how long before the spammers are able to exploit that…how long before the first links to porn and drugs sites appear?
• Thirdly, while I may have invented the ahfow namespace, I don’t own it and there’s nothing to stop “A Haven for Our Walruses” or some other similarly named entity from using the ahfow namespace. Admittedly that’s not very likely but it is a risk.

So there it is, if you’ve made it this far then congratulations and I’d appreciate any comment or input on this – it might seem like a small thing because ultimately all it really does is collect links and links is what the WWW has always been about anyway, but hopefully it will begin to organise all the really interesting Galaxie 500 related content out there.

The next task is to get my head round the Music Ontology so that all this lovely and useful (and unique) data I have can find a place in the wider world of linked data and I can start making better use of all the lovely and useful (and unique) data that’s already out there…when that happens A Head Full of Wishes won’t seem so small anymore.

As metadata is data about data, and metaphotography is photographs of people taking photographs then I’d have to assume that metablogging is blogging about being blogged.

I just implemented a delicious tagging system on A Head Full of Wishes (which I’ll write up in more detail tomorrow) and posted about it to the Galaxie 500 Mailing List and David Jennings blogged about it on his book related Net, Blogs & Rock’n'Roll blog.

But none of the other players have the depth of data about Tugboat that Head Full of Wishes has. A community of fans can take shared focus and commitment for granted, and when you add smart technology, smart organisation and good leadership to the mix, the community is pretty much impossible to beat in its chosen field.

I suppose writing about someone writing about me could be questionable (and including a picture of me must only make it worse) but it does give me the chance to plug David’s very excellent book Net, Blogs & Rock’n'Roll (buy from amazon uk | us) which examines discovering music in the digital age.