June 30, 2009 at 11:03 pm
It’s 11:03 pm PDT, and I’ve spent the last 90 minutes listening to a U2 concert that ended about eight hours ago: fan-taped, uploaded, and posted online. U2 is cool with this. The audio is on Kevin’s site. He has lots of bandwidth.
I don’t normally listen to bootlegs but this is the opening concert of the tour. Right now, I’m wrapping up a 14-hour day that I spent updating two web sites, posting the setlist live as it happened on Twitter, digging through YouTube, Flickr, Twitpic, Yfrog, and any other source possible for photos and video, sending out emails to U2 fan mailing lists, and so forth. You can see the results on U2tours.com and @U2 (scroll down through “Bits & Bytes” updates). And I’m not tooting my own horn; I’m tooting my friends and co-workers horns — the @U2/U2tours.com crew was amazing today — posting the setlist in @U2’s forum, spreading the word on Twitter, sending me stuff they found first, and so much more.
All of this made possible by technology that, if I stop to think about it, is mind-blowing. This was my humble setup today:
Probably hard to see, but on the main monitor there I have Tweetie open and a web browser. On the web browser I’m watching live / almost-live concert video streamed by fans via Qik.com. Srsly. There were four fans (that I know of) sending video right from Barcelona to my office. That’s frakkin’ crazy. And then I take what I saw and heard and post it on Twitter and on U2tours.com, and Lisa Z. (from @U2) posts it in the @U2 forum … and tens of thousands of U2 fans know what’s going on immediately. Bono says something, it’s online a minute later (if that). At the same time, I’m watching Twitter and dozens, maybe hundreds of fans inside the stadium are also posting updates. Retweet that stuff, and the world knows.
In 1997, my first “online U2 tour,” we would rush to the hotel room or our house after the show and post the setlist on the web and send it to the U2 fan mailing lists. You’d get the news within a couple hours after the show, maybe the next morning in the worst case scenario. It was amazing.
In 2001, friends inside the arenas would call and you’d get to listen to a few minutes of the show (and the audio was terrible, frankly), then they’d call again on the way out of the arena and recite the setlist. Fans would know what happened within 15-30 minutes of the end of the show. It was amazing.
In 2005, friends inside the arena called and you could listen to the whole show, and the audio was actually listenable. On opening night, three friends at the show called me, Michael, and Scott separately so we could hear. Then the three of us not at the show hopped on AIM together and chatted together about what we heard over the three separate phone lines. It was amazing – one of the most fun nights of my U2 fan life. You could pretty much post the setlist as it happened — literally within seconds of a song starting, it was on U2tours.com. But you had to wait until the next day for audio and/or video.
And today, live video (and audio) from inside the stadium as the show is going on. Photos all over Twitter and Flickr during the show. Thousands of fans giving and getting the scoop on every detail. The setlist posted as it happened, and broadcast to tens of thousands of fans around the world.
During the concert today, Sean pulled up a chair and sat next to me so he could watch everything — the videos, the pix, the live updates. I know I was more amazed by what was going on because I remember what it was like years ago. I hope I explained it well enough that he could appreciate it, too. I imagine someday, 10 years from now perhaps, he’ll be updating some web site (will they still exist then?) with links to every fan’s personal video/audio/photo web channel (we’ll all have them for our daily lifestreaming) and maybe he’ll look back and remember what it was like “in the old days” when he sat next to his dad to experience a U2 concert that was happening 5,407 miles away, but seemed like it was right in our hometown.
Technology is amazing.
June 25, 2009 at 1:09 am
After dealing with this spinning head stuff for about a month now, I was finally able to get in to see an ENT specialist today. Saw the same guy who did ear surgeries on both my kids when they were wee little ones and had lots of ear infections.
So, if there’s one condition that would just be too perfect for a U2 fan to come down with … a condition that involves dizziness and spinning heads … what condition would that be? I’ll give you one hint:
Yep. Unos, dos, tres, get dizzy. I’ve got Vertigo. Technically, I have Benign Paroxysmal Positional Vertigo:
What are the symptoms?
The main symptom is a feeling that you are spinning or tilting when you are not. This can happen when you move your head in a certain way, like rolling over in bed, turning your head quickly, bending over, or tipping your head back.
BPPV usually lasts a minute or two. It can be mild, or it can be bad enough to make you feel sick to your stomach and vomit. You may even find it hard to stand or walk without losing your balance.
That pretty much describes it to a “T”, but I’m lucky to have not had any vomiting or nausea. Everything else – been there, done that. The doctor gave me an information sheet that also talked about feeling lightheaded for several hours at a time, which is how things were at their worst a few weeks ago — couldn’t get anything done at all.
On the bright side, it’s really not terribly serious. The most common treatment is nothing. There are some procedures that can be done to minimize the dizziness, but most people learn to live with this. As long as I control my head movements, I should be okay. Driving isn’t a problem. Yardwork has been okay. Playing with the dogs, the kids, doing the shopping – all good.
I’m supposed to monitor my dizziness for the next week — which way am I turning my head when I get dizzy, what position am I in, etc. And I’ll see the doc again late next week and we’ll decide what, if anything, needs to be done.
Thanks to all who emailed after the last post about this. Really appreciate the thoughts and support. Now if you’ll just tell my daughter to stop walking around the house singing, “Hello, hello, you’ve got a disease called Vertigo,” everything will be much better!
March 30, 2009 at 9:15 pm
In 12 years of buying concert tickets online, never have I experienced as quick a turnaround as this. These are Sean’s and my U2 tickets for Giants Stadium later this year — we just ordered these last Monday, and they showed up in the mailbox today. Amazing. If memory serves, Ticketmaster usually waits about a month before sending tickets, unless it’s really urgent.
Still gonna try to get tickets for the 2nd Giants Stadium show, too, which we’ll both go to if I can get the tix. Then it looks like I’ll be going solo to the Vegas show in October. And that’ll probably be it for me … unless I decide to take on a bunch of new clients and have them finance it all.
March 12, 2009 at 7:22 pm
So much of our success in life is about outlook and attitude. Not others’ … but yours.
By the way, we have both of these articles on @U2:
U2’s ‘Horizon’ premieres with sky-high sales numbers
U2’s ‘Horizon’ sales bring band back to Earth
The same Billboard expert is interviewed in both articles. The same sales figures appear in both articles. And yet you couldn’t find two more different headlines if you tried.
It’s all a matter of perspective.
January 19, 2009 at 8:25 pm
One of the crosses you carry as a U2 fan is the fact that, at any moment in time, Bono might do something really, really, really embarrassing. Like this, from today’s Oprah show:
I really wish someone would tell him “no” once in a while. Or maybe just say, “Hey. Y’know, this thing bleeds syrup and is just a really bad song. If you do this, it’ll sit right next to that ‘New Day’ thing you did in ‘99 with Wyclef as the low point of your career.”
And jeez, did we elect a man, or did we elect a messiah? Goodness. Just watch — 3 years from now when we still have a gazillion-dollar national debt, the disciples will start in about how the expectations were unrealistic, and too much. And I’ll just point out this video and say, Who’s fault was that?
January 19, 2009 at 12:36 am
Still can’t decide if I like the song, but it’s not for lack of listening….
That’s my Last.fm music profile….
April 1, 2008 at 10:27 pm
It’s both incredibly cool and incredibly strange to see my name on a book cover image.
My publisher has chosen a tentative image for the cover of U2, A Diary, and that image is now available on Amazon. But, it may not be the actual image on the cover when the book is published later this year.
For those interested in knowing why, or just interested in seeing the cover image, I explain it all on the book blog:
Tentative Cover for U2, A Diary
March 6, 2008 at 12:32 am
It’s strange: Amazon has had my book listed for a few months now, both on the main .com site and on the UK site, too.
Meanwhile, Barnes & Noble? Nothing. Zilch. Nada. Doesn’t exist.
I wish I knew more about publishing. I know Amazon is the biggest book seller in the world, but why would there be such a huge separation between when they know about it and when everyone else knows about it?
December 26, 2007 at 2:09 pm
My son, Sean, just turned 10 and is becoming as big a music fan as I’ve been since about the age of 12. Up until recently, Sean has mainly followed Dad’s musical tastes: He loves U2 and has even been to one of their concerts; he listens to Coldplay; and he’s taken a liking to some of the CDs on my shelf like Snow Patrol and Keane.
All of that is fine from a fatherly perspective because I know the music he’s listening to, and with only a couple exceptions, don’t mind his young ears hearing these lyrics.
For Christmas, he put several CDs on his list from artists that I know nothing, or almost nothing about: Nickelback, The Bravery, and even Blake Lewis (the kid from American Idol).
That’s the first sign I’m getting old: When my kids start listening to bands/artists I don’t know. A week or so ago, Sean asked me if Lupe Fiasco’s real name was Lupe Fiasco or that was a fake name? I had to confess I’d never heard of Lupe Fiasco. The shame.
Then comes the lyrics issue. Do I worry about what these singers are saying in their songs? Of course I do!
That’s the second sign I’m getting old: When I worry about what my kids are hearing in the music they listen to. Should I listen to every song first to make sure it’s acceptable?
After thinking about, I decided to go ahead and buy some of these CDs even though I don’t know the artist and don’t know what they’re singing about. Here’s why:
- It’s not realistic to think I can listen to every song my son wants to listen to before he does, and approve or disapprove it. Who has time for that?
- As he gets older, and as kids grow up faster than they did when I was young, he’s going to be exposed to a lot more in the schoolyard, at his friends’ houses, etc., and I have to accept that’s just part of growing up.
- Most importantly, he’s a Good Kid and I have to trust the job we did as parents and trust him to adjust and mature in an appropriate way as he experiences new things.
But that doesn’t change the fact that I’m getting old, does it?
