I'm a bit knackered after a late night/early start/long day sequence, but here goes with another exciting post for my loyal reader.

Last night I returned to Darbuka for another gig by bassist Steve Lawson and singer Lobelia accompanied by drummer Ray Dodds. Support was again from ukulele strumming social media man Lloyd Davis playing some great old songs.

This time Lobelia and Steve each did some solo songs. Lo used some very night (bare) footwork to loop her guitar and voice. One song was pure voice and wonderful to hear. Steve gig a great cover of She Sells Sanctuary (on the seashore). Ray joined in with some great drumming and percussion on assorted hardware. Finally they all played together, which lent a new flavour to songs I feel I already know well. I chatted to them all as well as another bassist, Simon Little, who I met via Twitter and sat with during the gig. He's played with some well known acts and is doing his own solo work that I just obtained from his free podcast and am enjoying now.

I bought Lobelia's solo CD from a few years back. It features some songs I've heard live, but in much more conventional arrangements. I have to say I prefer them as performed now. I look forward to some more new material.

I had some cool musical experiences on the internet over the last week. Firstly I watched Steve, Lobelia and others perform at another gig via a live video stream on Ustream.tv. This included a chat forum where I could exchange messages with other viewers and people at the gig. That was fun. A recording of the gig is up now. This was followed on Sunday by them performing some songs at home and uploading them to Phreadz where others (with beta access) could post video replies. That was enjoyable too, despite some technical issues.

At work the other day a friend lent me a CD by Martin Simpson. Nice bit of folk with nifty guitar playing. I used QCD on my Windows PC and it did its usual thing of posting the tracks to Last.fm. I subscribe to an RSS feed there of gigs within a reasonable distance. Within an hour it included some of his. Sites like Amazon recommend music etc based on what you buy, but this was based on what I was listening to and with less commercialisation. I doubt I will go, but others would find that information useful. I've been alerts to gigs I have attended via this service. Each gig has a page where people can post comments and link to pictures etc. I've been on Last.fm for over four years and just clocked up 20,000 tracks. That's what I have listened to on the computers, but I do most of my listening like that. I often use their music streaming services to find new stuff. I was on one based around what people who listen to ELO like when I passed 20k.

My last cool musical link of the week is King Crimson Live. You can buy downloads of various concerts, but they also give away the odd track via a podcast called Hot Tickle. Cool or not I love a good bit of Prog.

I've been thinking that I need to learn some new tunes on my guitar, so I was poking around on Youtube and found a series on the tune Classical Gas (a song with its own web site!). I've done the first couple and it's not sounding too bad, although I think I am missing a few notes that he doesn't properly describe. I'm also consulting some tab versions that I found. I've not learnt many tunes from video, but it's handy for getting the fingering right. I'll see if I can learn the whole thing, but that may take a while.

Youtube has loads of musical tutorials for all types of music. There was nothing like that when I started playing. The guitar magazines I bought didn't even come with CDs (or equivalent) so that you could hear how a piece was supposed to sound. Total Guitar was a revelation when it appeared with a CD. Now they do DVDs and video files on the CD. Budding musicians have never had it so good.

I'm also trying to learn a few classical piano pieces by the old-fashioned method of sheet music. I find that a totally different mental exercise, but the results are enjoyable. I also get some benefit from coaching my kids on their respective instruments.

I'm on the lookout for any local musicians who want to cooperate. I'm listed on a couple of musician sites, but the replies I've had have been from bands who need someone with more time to commit. There's a new site dedicated to the arts in my town. I've been in contact with them about setting up a noticeboard for finding people to work with.

If you are really lucky I may eventually post some recordings when I've polished my technique and gained some studio skills.

Being a fan of web sites with a physical location I've felt the need for something that would tell you what sites relate to your local area. Groups Near You does this fairly well. You can add sites and match them up to an area on a Google map. There's no log-in, but it uses your email address to confirm changes and then that site is restricted to that email account. Some real potential if people add enough sites. I did a couple. It's a shame they don't make use of GeoURL to pick up the location of a site and then publish that data on their pages. Maybe I should mail them.

My other toy of the last few days was MyBlogLog. It's a Yahoo service that gives you some nice visitor tracking features for your site and lets you build a 'community' around it. The stats are nice, but I'm not totally convinced yet. I mainly joined in order to check out how their FOAF data appeared on the FOAFster visualisation tool.

identi.ca has been much improved by allowing you to see all your replies in one place. People had replied to some of my 'dents', but I had missed them. I've picked up a few followers who share my interests. These spontaneous communities are fun.

I know, horrible word, but new worlds need new language. I've been playing with Twitter for a while now. It's fun and I've made a few friends there. I even found a nice client in TwitterFox that lets me keep up with my updates from within Firefox. But there are some issues. The site is still struggling with performance issues, so sometimes it doesn't all work. The ability to post from XMPP/Jabber/GTalk has been down for weeks. I've been seeing a lot of the Fail Whale when I go to the site. Another issue with Twitter is that it is a closed source system.

This week I found out about identi.ca. It looks like a Twitter clone, but lacks a lot of the features. That should change as it is running on open source software. I've not checked it out myself, but I expect a few people will be. That means that more people could set up their own microblog sites. The problem then is that the network will be fragmented. They have an answer to that in the OpenMicroBlogging specification to allow messages to be sent between services. I'm not sure if you can actually do that yet, but it's a good sign.

Other good signs are use of OpenID for those who don't want yet another password and FOAF to make the data accessible. It also works fine from my IM clients. There is a lot of work to do there, but I have high hopes. I've even linked up with one of my Twitter contacts there. I've picked up a few followers for unknown reasons. I'm unsure of their motives. The same thing happens on Twitter as an attempt to get attention.

My other new web presence this week is at Whoisi. This appears to be similar to FriendFeed, but with some crucial differences. There is no ability to log in. Anyone can create and edit an account for anyone they choose and associate feeds with it, but they have no ownership of it. That sounds like anarchy, but we shall see. I've seen mention of them keeping history in case of vandalism. On FriendFeed I created my own feeds for friends to track their various accounts, but that was private to me. I could do the same on Whoisi and then anyone could follow them. Is that a good idea or an invasion of privacy. Some people might not want their various on-line identities to be linked. If they are not already making the connections public then I will not do so. You can still select a group of people to follow, but that setting is only stored as a cookie or as a private unique link that you need to save. As with identi.ca, some people I know are already there. The site will suit those who don't want to have to set up more accounts, but lacks conveniences like RSS.

I don't actually sign up for every service I hear about. There have been a few I have checked out and then not used, but generally I only sign up if I see a real use. I have my core of useful sites linked from the homepage of this site.