youtubecommunity的简单介绍

求文章(英文版):foreign teenagers一天的生活/介绍foreign teenagers的activities

Jonathan Coulton sat in Gorilla Coffee in Brooklyn, his Apple

PowerBook open before him, and began slogging through the day's

e-mail. Coulton is 16 and shaggily handsome. In September 2005, he

quit his job as a computer programmer and, with his wife's guarded

blessing, became a full-time singer and songwriter. He set a quixotic

goal for himself: for the next year, he would write and record a song

each week, posting each one to his blog. "It was a sort of

forced-march approach to creativity," he admitted to me over the sound

of the cafe's cappuccino frothers. He'd always wanted to be a

full-time musician, and he figured the only way to prove to himself he

could do it was with a drastic challenge. "I learned that it is

possible to squeeze a song out of just about anything," he said. "But

it's not always an easy or pleasant process." Given the self-imposed

time constraints, the "Thing a Week" songs are remarkably good.

Coulton tends toward geeky, witty pop tunes: one song, "Tom Cruise

Crazy," is a sympathetic ode to the fame-addled star, while "Code

Monkey" is a rocking anthem about dead-end programming jobs. By the

middle of last year, his project had attracted a sizable audience.

More than 3,000 people, on average, were visiting his site every day,

and his most popular songs were being downloaded as many as 500,000

times; he was making what he described as "a reasonable middle-class

living" — between $3,000 and $5,000 a month — by selling CDs and

digital downloads of his work on iTunes and on his own site.

Skip to next paragraph

Jennifer Karady for The New York Times

Getting the Word Out Jonathan Coulton at Gorilla Coffee in Brooklyn.

Corresponding with fans is time-consuming, he says, but essential.

Multimedia

Decoding 'Code Monkey'Video

Decoding 'Code Monkey'

Related

Jonathan Coulton on YouTube

"Code Monkey": A YouTube Video by Mike Spiff Booth

Another "Code Monkey" Fan's Take on the Song

An Animated Version of Jonathan Coulton's "My Monkey" by "The Rainbow Coalition"

An Animated Version of Jonathan Coulton's "re: Your Brains" by Mike Spiff Booth

Along the way, he discovered a fact that many small-scale recording

artists are coming to terms with these days: his fans do not want

merely to buy his music. They want to be his friend. And that means

they want to interact with him all day long online. They pore over his

blog entries, commenting with sympathy and support every time he

recounts the difficulty of writing a song. They send e-mail messages,

dozens a day, ranging from simple mash notes of the "you rock!"

variety to starkly emotional letters, including one by a man who

described singing one of Coulton's love songs to his 6-month-old

infant during her heart surgery. Coulton responds to every letter,

though as the e-mail volume has grown to as many as 100 messages a

day, his replies have grown more and more terse, to the point where

he's now feeling guilty about being rude.

Coulton welcomes his fans' avid attention; indeed, he relies on his

fans in an almost symbiotic way. When he couldn't perform a guitar

solo for "Shop Vac," a glittery pop tune he had written about suburban

angst — on his blog, he cursed his "useless sausage fingers" — Coulton

asked listeners to record their own attempts, then held an online vote

and pasted the winning riff into his tune. Other followers have

volunteered hours of their time to help further his career: a

professional graphic artist in Cleveland has drawn an illustration for

each of the weekly songs, free. Another fan recently reformatted

Coulton's tunes so they'd be usable on karaoke machines. On his online

discussion board last June, when Coulton asked for advice on how to

make more money with his music, dozens of people chimed in with tips

on touring and managing the media and even opinions about what kind of

songs he ought to write.

Coulton's fans are also his promotion department, an army of thousands

who proselytize for his work worldwide. More than 50 fans have created

music videos using his music and posted them on YouTube; at a recent

gig, half of the audience members I spoke to had originally come

across his music via one of these fan-made videos. When he performs,

he upends the traditional logic of touring. Normally, a new

Brooklyn-based artist like him would trek around the Northeast in grim

circles, visiting and revisiting cities like Boston and New York and

Chicago in order to slowly build an audience — playing for 3 people

the first time, then 10, then (if he got lucky) 50. But Coulton

realized he could simply poll his existing online audience members,

find out where they lived and stage a tactical strike on any town with

more than 100 fans, the point at which he'd be likely to make $1,000

for a concert. It is a flash-mob approach to touring: he parachutes

into out-of-the-way towns like Ardmore, Pa., where he recently played

to a sold-out club of 140.

His fans need him; he needs them. Which is why, every day, Coulton

wakes up, gets coffee, cracks open his PowerBook and hunkers down for

up to six hours of nonstop and frequently exhausting communion with

his virtual crowd. The day I met him, he was examining a music video

that a woman who identified herself as a "blithering fan" had made for

his song "Someone Is Crazy." It was a collection of scenes from anime

cartoons, expertly spliced together and offered on YouTube.

"She spent hours working on this," Coulton marveled. "And now her

friends are watching that video, and fans of that anime cartoon are

watching this video. And that's how people are finding me. It's a

crucial part of the picture. And so I have to watch this video; I have

to respond to her." He bashed out a hasty thank-you note and then

forwarded the link to another supporter — this one in Britain — who

runs "The Jonathan Coulton Project," a Web site that exists

specifically to archive his fan-made music videos.

He sipped his coffee. "People always think that when you're a musician

you're sitting around strumming your guitar, and that's your job," he

said. "But this" — he clicked his keyboard theatrically — "this is my

job."

In the past — way back in the mid-'90s, say — artists had only

occasional contact with their fans. If a musician was feeling

friendly, he might greet a few audience members at the bar after a

show. Then the Internet swept in. Now fans think nothing of sending an

e-mail message to their favorite singer — and they actually expect a

personal reply. This is not merely an illusion of intimacy. Performing

artists these days, particularly new or struggling musicians, are

increasingly eager, even desperate, to master the new social rules of

Internet fame. They know many young fans aren't hearing about bands

from MTV or magazines anymore; fame can come instead through viral

word-of-mouth, when a friend forwards a Web-site address, swaps an

MP3, e-mails a link to a fan blog or posts a cellphone concert video

on YouTube.

So musicians dive into the fray — posting confessional notes on their

blogs, reading their fans' comments and carefully replying. They check

their personal pages on MySpace, that virtual metropolis where unknown

bands and comedians and writers can achieve global renown in a matter

of days, if not hours, carried along by rolling cascades of

popularity. Band members often post a daily MySpace "bulletin" — a

memo to their audience explaining what they're doing right at that

moment — and then spend hours more approving "friend requests" from

teenagers who want to be put on the artist's sprawling list of online

colleagues. (Indeed, the arms race for "friends" is so intense that

some artists illicitly employ software robots that generate hundreds

of fake online comrades, artificially boosting their numbers.) The pop

group Barenaked Ladies held a video contest, asking fans to play air

guitar along to the song "Wind It Up"; the best ones were spliced

together as the song's official music video. Even artists who haven't

got a clue about the Internet are swept along: Arctic Monkeys, a

British band, didn't know what MySpace was, but when fans created a

page for them in 2005 — which currently boasts over 65,000 "friends" —

it propelled their first single, "I Bet You Look Good on the

Dancefloor," to No. 1 on the British charts.

This trend isn't limited to musicians; virtually every genre of

artistic endeavor is slowly becoming affected, too. Filmmakers like

Kevin Smith ("Clerks") and Rian Johnson ("Brick") post dispatches

about the movies they're shooting and politely listen to fans'

suggestions; the comedian Dane Cook cultivated such a huge fan base

through his Web site that his 2005 CD "Retaliation" became the first

comedy album to reach the Billboard Top 5 since 1978. But musicians

are at the vanguard of the change. Their product, the three-minute

song, was the first piece of pop culture to be fully revolutionized by

the Internet. And their second revenue source — touring — makes them

highly motivated to connect with far-flung fans.

This confluence of forces has produced a curious inflection point: for

rock musicians, being a bit of a nerd now helps you become successful.

When I spoke with Damian Kulash, the lead singer for the band OK Go,

he discoursed like a professor on the six-degrees-of-separation

theory, talking at one point about "rhizomatic networks." (You can

Google it.) Kulash has put his networking expertise to good use: last

year, OK Go displayed a canny understanding of online dynamics when it

posted on YouTube a low-budget homemade video that showed the band

members dancing on treadmills to their song "Here It Goes Again." The

video quickly became one of the site's all-time biggest hits. It led

to the band's live treadmill performance at the MTV Video Music

Awards, which in turn led to a Grammy Award for best video.

This is not a trend that affects A-list stars. The most famous

corporate acts — Justin Timberlake, Fergie, Beyoncé — are still

creatures of mass marketing, carpet-bombed into popularity by

expensive ad campaigns and radio airplay. They do not need the online

world to find listeners, and indeed, their audiences are too vast for

any artist to even pretend intimacy with. No, this is a trend that is

catalyzing the B-list, the new, under-the-radar acts that have always

built their success fan by fan. Across the country, the CD business is

in a spectacular free fall; sales are down 20 percent this year alone.

People are increasingly getting their music online (whether or not

they're paying for it), and it seems likely that the artists who forge

direct access to their fans have the best chance of figuring out what

the new economics of the music business will be.

The universe of musicians making their way online includes many bands

that function in a traditional way — signing up with a label — while

using the Internet primarily as a means of promotion, the way OK Go

has done. Two-thirds of OK Go's album sales are still in the physical

world: actual CDs sold through traditional CD stores. But the B-list

increasingly includes a newer and more curious life-form: performers

like Coulton, who construct their entire business model online.

Without the Internet, their musical careers might not exist at all.

Coulton has forgone a record-label contract; instead, he uses a

growing array of online tools to sell music directly to fans. He

contracts with a virtual fulfillment house called CD Baby, which

warehouses his CDs, processes the credit-card payment for each sale

and ships it out, while pocketing only $4 of the album's price, a much

smaller cut than a traditional label would take. CD Baby also places

his music on the major digital-music stores like iTunes, Rhapsody and

Napster. Most lucratively, Coulton sells MP3s from his own personal

Web sites, where there's no middleman at all.

In total, 41 percent of Coulton's income is from digital-music sales,

three-quarters of which are sold directly off his own Web site.

Another 29 percent of his income is from CD sales; 18 percent is from

ticket sales for his live shows. The final 11 percent comes from

T-shirts, often bought online.

Indeed, running a Web store has allowed Coulton and other artists to

experiment with intriguing innovations in flexible pricing.

Remarkably, Coulton offers most of his music free on his site; when

fans buy his songs, it is because they want to give him money. The

Canadian folk-pop singer Jane Siberry has an even more clever system:

she has a "pay what you can" policy with her downloadable songs, so

fans can download them free — but her site also shows the average

price her customers have paid for each track. This subtly creates a

community standard, a generalized awareness of how much people think

each track is really worth. The result? The average price is as much

as $1.30 a track, more than her fans would pay at iTunes.

Yet this phenomenon isn't merely about money and business models. In

many ways, the Internet's biggest impact on artists is emotional. When

you have thousands of fans interacting with you electronically, it can

feel as if you're on stage 24 hours a day.

"I vacillate so much on this," Tad Kubler told me one evening in

March. "I'm like, I want to keep some privacy, some sense of mystery.

But I also want to have this intimacy with our fans. And I'm not sure

you can have both." Kubler is the guitarist for the Brooklyn-based

rock band the Hold Steady, and I met up with him at a Japanese bar in

Pittsburgh, where the band was performing on its latest national tour.

An exuberant but thoughtful blond-surfer type, Kubler drank a Sapporo

beer and explained how radically the Internet had changed his life on

the road. His previous band existed before the Web became ubiquitous,

and each town it visited was a mystery: Would 20 people come out?

Would two? When the Hold Steady formed four years ago, Kubler

immediately signed up for a MySpace page, later adding a discussion

board, and curious fans were drawn in like iron filings to a magnet.

Now the band's board teems with fans asking technical questions about

Kubler's guitars, swapping bootlegged MP3 recordings of live gigs with

each other, organizing carpool drives to see the band. Some send

e-mail messages to Kubler from cities where the band will be

performing in a couple of weeks, offering to design, print and

distribute concert posters free. As the band's appointed geek, Kubler

handles the majority of its online audience relations; fans at gigs

chant his online screen-name, "Koob."

"It's like night and day, man," Kubler said, comparing his current

situation with his pre-Internet musical career. "It's awesome now."

Kubler regards fan interaction as an obligation that is cultural,

almost ethical. He remembers what it was like to be a young fan

himself, enraptured by the members of Led Zeppelin. "That's all I

wanted when I was a fan, right?" he said. "To have some small contact

with these guys you really dug. I think I'm still that way. I'll be,

like, devastated if I never meet Jimmy Page before I die." Indeed, for

a guitarist whose arms are bedecked in tattoos and who maintains an

aggressive schedule of drinking, Kubler seems genuinely touched by the

shy queries he gets from teenagers.

"If some kid is going to take 10 minutes out of his day to figure out

what he wants to say in an e-mail, and then write it and send it, for

me to not take the 5 minutes to say, dude, thanks so much — for me to

ignore that?" He shrugged. "I can't."

Yet Kubler sometimes has second thoughts about the intimacy. Part of

the allure of rock, when he was a kid, was the shadowy glamour that

surrounded his favorite stars. He'd parse their lyrics to try to

figure out what they were like in person. Now he wonders: Are today's

online artists ruining their own aura by blogging? Can you still

idolize someone when you know what they had for breakfast this

morning? "It takes a little bit of the mystery out of rock 'n' roll,"

he said.

求NEWS STORY！ 别拿旧的好吧 高分求！

我给您提供两则：

Couple Born on Same Day, Married 75 Years, Die One Day Apart

By Gillian Mohney - Jul 27, 2013

A California couple born on the same day and married for 75 years, died only one day apart.

According to the Long Beach Press-Telegram, Helen and Les Brown died on July 16 and 17 respectively, both were 94.

Zach Henderson, owner of the Ma N’Pa Grocery in Long Beach, Calif., said he saw the couple almost daily and called their relationship “a wonderful blessing.”

“About a year ago, [Helen] had her hand on his face and they were cheek to cheek,” Henderson said. “She said, ‘Isn’t he the most handsome man you’ve ever seen?’ hat’s exactly how they were. They were full of love and passion.”

According to the Press-Telegram, the couple also shared the same birthday of Dec. 31, 1918, and eloped in 1937 after they met in high school.

Henderson said that even though the couple were in their 90s they remained active in their community and insisted a local band set up in their driveway during a residential block party.

“They were fun-loving and beautiful people,” Henderson said.

The couple were Jehovah’s Witnesses and their oldest son, Les Brown Jr., told the Press-Telegram their faith strengthened their marriage.

“It was a real love match, wasn’t it,” said Les Brown Jr. “They were together every day for 75 years.”

‘Hope Springs’ Eternal for Long Married Couples

When they died, the Press-Telegram reported that Les Brown was suffering from Parkinson’s disease and Helen Brown had stomach cancer. However, Henderson said he never realized that Helen Brown was sick, even though he dropped off groceries to their home almost on daily basis.

“She was completely cognitive,” Henderson said, describing how he found Helen Brown a few days before she died. “It seems like she was waiting for Les to be comfortable and they were going to move on to something else with each other.”

A public service will be held for the couple on Saturday afternoon in Long Beach, Calif.

_________________________________________________________

Adalia Rose, 6 year-old with premature aging, promotes fundraiser for Progeria cure.

Adalia Rose is a  6-years-young, but she has a condition that makes her look much older. She suffers from a rare genetic disorder called progeria, which causes premature aging in children. But instead of allowing that to conquer her life, Adalia has become an inspiration to millions and a beacon of hope for other children who struggle with the condition.

According to Gawker, Adalia first came into the spotlight last year after a video of her dancing to 'Ice Ice Baby' went viral on YouTube. Her story and incredible spirit drewmore than 6 million followers to her Facebook page.

She's now in the news to promote a fundraiser for the Progeria Research Foundation. On August 4, the Blue Starlite Mini Urban Drive-In in Austin, Texas, will feature Adalia's favorite movie, 'Grease,' and raise money and awareness in the hope of finding a cure.

Although a method of reversal has not yet been found, the foundation announced their discovery of the first-ever treatment for progeria last year.

Despite her condition, Adalia remains ever-hopeful. She is quoted saying on her Facebook page, "Everyday is a special day."

We can't stop rooting for her.