We’re pleased at CDM to introduce a new verb: to Elton John will hereby mean to unplug from the Web in order to do creative work. No blogging, emergency emails only (heck, ignoring the emergency emails will be even more satisfying), no RSS, etc. In all seriousness, it’s a great idea. The Web will be used only to solve, say, bugs in my Processing code. I don’t particularly need to share my own state of Elton John, of course, but I do this only to advocate selective Eltoning to boost creativity. (I don’t think you need to Elton on a long-term basis — even just a day is often enough. A week’s Elton can also be a good idea, especially when on vacation.)

I’ll be Elton Johning today in preparation for an open house showing at Eyebeam tomorrow of a project I’m working on. Create Digital Motion has been a somewhat permanent state of Elton John, but expect it to be De-Eltoned within the week — I’ve got a backlog of stories, and Jaymis is returning, along with some other guest writers.

In the meantime, we strongly encourage you to spread both the act and the term Elton Johning when appropriate to your friends and colleagues. You can also place this on your voicemail: “Hello. You’ve reached Peter Kirn. I’m sorry I’m not available to take your call, but I’m currently Elton John. Leave a message for either of us after the beep.”

What the heck I’m on about

We’ve already been exchanging some great tips for organizing your life, both musical and mundane. On the musical side, one of the most compelling software tools just got a big update today:

Minim: Music Management for Musicians

This elegant, very Mac-like utility organizes your songs, storing lyrics and audio/MIDI files and letting you track metadata about what songs are on what albums and work in what venue and are in what state and require what musicians … you get the idea. Basic features:

1. Metadata and lyrics
2. Albums and album art
3. Audio and MIDI files, images, and videos
4. Collaboration via iChat (nifty!)

The update features a slick new interface and the ability for songs to live in multiple albums. You can even upload directly to the community site iCompositions.

It looks really nice, but I’m also enjoying the wiki approach for content, since it allows the app and data to live, cross-platform, on a flash stick. Anyone know a good, TiddlyWiki-style wiki (or TiddlyWiki plugin) with multimedia support? And anyone using Minim for your music? I’d love to hear how it’s working for you.

FreelancingThingsDone (FTD): Where Your Next Action May Be Your Last.

Here in the US, it’s almost tax time for anyone who lacks an accountant and procrastinates. That’s all the more reason to consider tools for keeping your life together, from mundane stuff that has to get done to musical and creative materials that keep you inspired and artistically productive. It’s a huge volume of information.

My recent solution has been to un-tether myself as much as possible from traditional, platform-specific, offline applications. I’m not one of those people who believes music software will someday all be online, Web 2.0-style. Music DSP and complex music creation software loves to be tied to a platform, running locally, performing advanced sonic marvels on your local CPU; end of story. But that’s all the more reason to have less to deal with for everything else. With licenses for Ableton Live, Reaktor, Max/MSP, and various plug-ins to worry about, live musical sets to backup and organize, visual programming code and patches and video files and everything else, and four machines in the house, three of which regularly go out for gigs with me in alternation — well, you get the idea.

I plan to do a full writeup on this soon, but here’s a quick peak, because I’d like to get some of your feedback before I do a full feature. My organizational toolkit right now is:

1. Gmail for email, with the Greasemonkey Gmail scripts to speed things up.
2. Google Reader for RSS reading, which I’ve found bar-none is the fastest way to get through RSS feeds thanks to its latest update.
3. Google Docs and Spreadsheets for mobile document reading and sharing, though I do still rely on NeoOffice for Mac and Microsoft Office 2007 for Windows for everything else. And, of course, a local text editor (TextMate for Mac and SCiTE for Windows) is still essential.
4. del.icio.us for bookmarks, plus the Firefox extension, though I am looking for a better tool for online research — when I actually want to clip and take some notes.
5. Basecamp for organizational stuff, which is now running CDM, basically — definitely a must to have separate “groupware.”
6. Flickr for photos.
7. New — TiddlyWiki for taking notes.