Jim Carini recently shared his incredible idea with us and I had to pass it along. First the background:
According to Newsweek, the struggling US economy is bringing about an upcoming Charity Crisis due to people losing jobs and trying to save more. 2008’s charitable donations are expected to be down $8-10 billion! It’s estimated that 100,000 nonprofits nationwide may be forced to close their doors leaving millions of Americans without a safety net during the worst recession since the great depression.
So Jim mashed up the modern day trend of a Flashmob (big group of people showing up, doing something crazy, then dispersing) with Charitable contributions into something he calls Flashmob4Charity.
The idea: Get 1 million people to each give just $10 to create a war chest
from which the flashmob4charity community makes grants each month to
charities facing financial crisis. And to keep things non-controversial
they¹ll only be concentrating on food, shelter, clothing and medical care
charities.
So head over to Flashmob4Charity and sign up to pledge $10. You’ll only get charged if at least 100,000 people sign up so that it has the intended grand-scale effect. They’ve also done a compilation album with indie label Nettwerk Music Group. Everyone who pledges atleast $10 will get a special link where they can download the album free.
One of my goals this year is to volunteer somewhere. Where do you guys volunteer and do charity work?
Also, a pro tip: If you want to see which blogs featured a given album, just click on the points and other numbers in the top right corner – you will then see thumbnails of each post that listed it with the given rank!
1) Best 50 Albums of 2008 – We compiled data from over 700 year-end blog posts (many found via Largehearted Boy’s list of lists), analyzed it, and released it into the wild so everyone can see what bloggers were excited about in 2008. You can listen to full previews of the albums via imeem and browse bite-sized reviews via Musebin. We’ve also shared the data we used to compile this list under a CC license so people can see what we are working with. Check out last year’s post to see how we arrived at our numbers.
2) Zeitgeist 2008 Radio Show – Blogfresh Radio produced a kickass podcast series featuring the 50 albums in our Zeitgeist. The shows include interviews with prominent music bloggers and plenty of music, so tune in every day for the next segment as we count down to the best album of 2008.
3) Best 50 Artists – We looked at what bands were written about most frequently in the past year and built a list of the top 50. Then we mixed it with the most recent tracks for each of those artists to create a vibrant overview of the year in artists.
4) Best 50 Songs – We looked through our users’ favoriting activity and picked out the most loved songs of each month of 2008. We’ll release more data throughout the week, so keep checking back to see if one of your favorite songs made the list.
Enjoy, and let us know what you’re remembering/rediscovering/finding out about for the first time!
Dropbox is a web service that I’ve recently fallen in love with. In the past I’ve used an external hard drive to manually backup my music collection (my most prized possession) about once a month. Then I’d copy all the new files manually over to my laptop to keep things in sync. But no more!
1) I Installed the app on my desktop (PC) and laptop (Mac).
2) I deleted my music collection from my laptop (the lesser up to date version of the two)
3) I setup a shared folder called Music within my Dropbox
4) I moved all my music on my PC into this folder
5) A few days later I had my entire music collection on my PC, Mac, and a copy backed up to the Web!
Best part is there is no more effort after this. When I download a new album from eMusic on my laptop, it instantly copies over to my desktop and visa versa. And the tragic day when both machines die a horrible death, I’ll still have a copy backed up to the web. Viva la Dropbox!
You can try it out with 2GB of storage for free, or pay $10/month for 50GB of storage. To me this is a small price to pay to never have to worry about losing my precious music collection again.
I’d love to hear what you guys think of this or what methods you’ve concocted to keep your treasures safe 🙂
Update: For those who are willing to give up syncing across computers for unlimited storage, check out Backblaze.
UPDATE: The form is has been closed for a few days, stay tuned for the results!
We’ll be launching another fantastic Music Blog Zeitgeist later this month capturing the best artists, albums and songs of 2008 (with a few extra surprises!).
Want to participate? Here’s how:
1) You need to have a blog (doesn’t matter if you aren’t listed on The Hype Machine, we want your opinions too!)
2) You need to post your Top 10 Albums of 2008 list
3) Head over to the Top 10 Album Submission Form and submit your data.
That’s it! You’re votes will be included in and will be presented on our site (check out last year’s listings for an example). Help us spread the word, as the form will close on December 15th.
Hype Machine indexes hundreds of music sites and collects their latest posts for easy streaming and discovery. We're here to help you find the best new music first.
