Hanging Up On Negativity & Being Positive
I wouldn’t call myself an overly positive person. I do believe in positive energy and like the idea of a glass that is half full. I have been on the opposite side of the scale at different points in my life, especially during bouts of depression, and at times I’m also a realist. Having said that, I’m no longer at a crossroads in my life. I have learned that seeing the glass half empty is a waste of energy that can be channeled to a more positive outlook. There are moments when I start to feel down, but I do my best to think logically about the situation and I surely don’t complain to every person who is within earshot or on a social network away about how I feel. I wouldn’t want my negative energy to bring someone else down. It’s not fair to my friends to feel bad or depressed because I am. That’s not cool at all.
Lately, I’ve begun to see a trend. Maybe it’s because I’m enjoying my time seeing the world through rose colored glasses, but being around negative vibes is unavoidable when I allow myself to be subjected to it. No more. I’m hanging up on the people who spend all their time complaining about how terrible their life is and do nothing about it. I’m hanging up on the people who would love nothing but a bullshit flame war because they have so much anger inside that they taunt you into replying to their negative comments to get some sort of reaction. I’m over it, over it… so fucking over it.
Tagged: BW, Choices, Friends, Life, Negativity, Personal, Positivity, Social Media, Thoughts, Twitter
10 Essential WordPress Plugins For Musicians
Every band or musician needs a web presence. Nothing says professional like an official site and it will do wonders for getting your music noticed. If you are a band or musician and are thinking of or already using WordPress, these plugins are essential for your site. From SEO purposes to posting upcoming gigs and displaying galleries of images from recent concerts, these plugins will help you get on the right track… pun intended.
Tagged: Design, Digg, Gigs, Last.fm, Musicians, Plugins, Podcast, Podcasting, SEO, Social Networking, Twitter, Web Design, Wordpress, YouTube
Twitter + Music + Monday = #musicmonday
Every Monday on Twitter, you will see “#musicmonday” as a trending topic. This meme is a popular one, which makes me happy because you know how I love music! Everyone who participates in “#musicmonday” shares music within a tweet using different services that allow you to share music on Twitter. The tweet is then appended with the #musicmonday hashtag so you can see what everyone is listening to and hopefully find new music that you never existed. Every Monday I share as well as find something new.
Today I sharing my music within this post, and guess what the theme is? Why Monday, of course! All the songs I’m sharing have the word Monday in the title. I’ve included some classics, some covers, and even managed to fit in a mashup.
The Right Track: Tunes To TargetCancer
Today a new charity is launching to help raise awareness and find cures for rare and underfunded forms of cancer. With the support of the music community, TargetCancer is using donations from music lovers to fund their cause. To achieve this, musicians have and will continue to donate unreleased music for you to download with all proceeds going to TargetCancer. The charity also will be holding concerts and events.
Every month there will be new music from different artists for you to check out and with the help of your purchase of a track, you do a small part to help something that has affected or will affect us at some time in our lives, whether it be a loved one or even yourself. I know first hand how cancer can destroy a family. Cancer goes beyond being a disease in one person; it touches everyone around it in a profound way once it has made it’s presence in a life known, a life that once may have only known innocence will now know sadness, anger, and tragedy.
Because of my personal experience with cancer and dealing with the loss of family and friends who were afflicted, I am supporting TargetCancer and getting the word out today that there is something that everyone can do. Even if you think downloading one song for less than a dollar is insignificant, if we can get the word out, that one song could be added to the thousands or millions of songs downloaded by people who hear about this organization. Remember, 100% of all proceeds go straight to TargetCancer. We CAN make a difference. Will you help?
To help TargetCancer, please check out the following links:
TargetCancer Official: http://www.targetcancer.info
The Right Track: http://www.righttracktunes.org
Twitter: TargetCancer / RightTrackTunes
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/targetcancer
Songs Currently Available from ‘The Right Track: Tunes To Target Cancer’
Weezer – “The Rat Race”
Ween – “DC Won’t Do You No Good”
The Donnas – “Can’t Keep It a Secret”
Cowboy Junkies – “In My Time of Need” (Ryan Adams cover)
Dean and Britta – “International Velvet Theme” (Caledonia Mix)
Buffalo Tom – “Thrown” (Live From Somerville Theater)
Linda Thompson – “Never the Bride”
Mike Viola – “This is Love, This is Life”
Drug Rug – “Coffee In the Morning” (Alternate Version)
The Gravel Pit – “Yellow Light Purple”
Happy Ending – “Through Your Eyes”
You can preview the track and you have the choice of downloading the flac or mp3 file of each song. Each song is less than a dollar but you can donate anything above that if you can, even if it’s just a few more cents.
Please help make a difference today and spread the word.
Cancer kills. Let’s kill cancer with music.
Rockstar Geeks Who Wave & Tweet
Last week I asked some of the people I follow on Twitter to humor me and play a game. In Google Wave, I invited all of them to participate in a little game that was part “get to know you”, part “get to know Wave”, and all fun.
Tagged: Classical, Electronic, Electronica, Folk, Fun, Google Wave, Hair Band, Indie, Meme, Musicians, Pop, R&B, Rock, Social Media, Tweet, Twitter
Web 2.0 Origami Icons
In case you haven’t noticed already, some of the icons on my site look like origami. Well, that is thanks to Paddy Donnelly, a web designer who initially created the Twitter icon for his own site and decided to release a set of 15 origami icons for free download and use on other sites. I have to say, I was quite impressed at the uniqueness of them and how life-like they are.
If you would like to nab a copy of these icons for yourself, click here and get yours today!
You can also follow Paddy on Twitter.
Music + Twitter = Love
As an avid music lover and prolific Twitter user, I love to share music on my timeline. With the popularity of Twitter growing drastically every day, there are more and more sites that are making sharing music on Twitter easier. I’ve compiled a list of some cool sites to check out. If you don’t see one that you know listed, please leave a link in the comments so I can add it to the list!
Music + Twitter = Love
Okay, this social music site has been around for a while, but if you use Last.fm and Twitter, why not integrate them? You can add your latest tweets to your Last.fm sidebar or you can use Twitterfeed and feed your last played songs into your profile. Just visit Twitterfeed, set up the account, and grab the RSS feed from your Last.fm page and select how often and how many songs you want to feed from your recent activity. Very cool tool!
If you want to add Twitter to your Last.fm profile page, you can see an example on my profile here. Just visit LastTweet.com, enter your username, style, and you are done!
Another cool site for Last.fm and Twitter is LastFMTweetLove. Here you can enter your Twitter and Last.fm information and every time you “love” a song on Last.fm, it will tweet it to your profile.
Blip.fm works like Twitter, but instead of just tweeting, you are actually “blipping” a song as well. The cool thing about Blip.fm is that you can not only be your own DJ, but you can set up your Twitter account under Blip.fm’s settings tab and whenever you “blip” a song, it will tweet to your profile. Plus, since this is a social service, you can enter a message that will be included with the link to the song. Very sweet! (If you want to “scrobble” your blips to your Last.fm profile, you can set that up under settings as well.) Follow @Blipfm on Twitter for updates to their site.
The wonderful thing about TinySong.com is that you can enter any song you want to share on Twitter into the search box, which then gives you a list of songs to choose from. Once you’ve found the song you want to share, you select it and it automatically creates a tinyurl of the song link and auto-copies it to your clipboard which you can then tweet and when someone clicks on it, it will play the song on Grooveshark. You don’t need a Grooveshark account to hear the music!
Speaking of Grooveshark, they made a cool site where you can log into your Twitter account and listen to music that people are sharing through Twitter. Their tagline sums it up: “Twisten.fm crawls Twitter for tweets about music. Then you listen to them.” Got it? Good.
tweettj.com is a pretty kickass site that lets you “discover the music people are tweeting about”. It lists recent tweets with links to the Twitter profiles and songs, and also lists the top music artist being tweeted. You can follow @tweettj on Twitter.
Song.ly is another very cool, yet simple site to share music on Twitter. You can add the URL of an mp3 file or type in a song name and search. On their front page it states:
Sounds cool to me! Follow @Song_ly here on Twitter here.
Twiturm.com is sorta kinda like the ones listed above, but it works differently in the sense that you can actually upload songs that you can’t find on other music databases and then tweet them. Follow @Twiturm on Twitter here.
Okay, 8tracks.com isn’t really something you just integrate into Twitter, but if you like making and listening to mixtapes, you can make a mix there and tweet the link to your mix on Twitter. People can leave comments in your 8tracks account about your mix and you can follow other DJ’s. You can follow @8tracks on Twitter as well.
Songza.com is a pretty nifty music site that allows you to search for a song or artist. When it pulls the results, you can click on the song you want and it gives you the option to share. Once you hover over “share”, you will see “Twitter This” on the left and when you click it, it pops up a box to add your information in as well as a message and that’s it! Nice and neat! You can also follow @Songza on Twitter.
I hope you enjoyed this list and remember to leave a comment if there are any other sites out there I should add to this list! Share the music and spread the love!
Tagged: Social Media, Social Sites, Twitter
TweetHug Launches Tomorrow!
The time has come! TweetHug officially starts tomorrow at 11:11 AM EST. Make sure to follow @TweetHug on Twitter and check out the site at TweetHug.com.
I started TweetHug to spread love across Twitter. Don’t miss out!
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