Consumating.com was a community website marketed as a geek-dating site that I joined a few years ago at the suggestion of a friend. You would read people’s profiles and answers to questions and rate their responses with a thumbs-up or thumbs-down. I was wary of the dating part but intrigued by the rating part and became very active at answering the questions. Each Monday a new ‘question of the week’ was posted and it was a race to see who could get their most creative response up the fastest. The sooner it was up, the more people saw it, and the more ‘thumbs’ you could garner. Some of the material I use on this site sprang out of that process.
Consudeath
Anyhow, Consumating.com was bought by cnet, who soon found that the user base reacted poorly to any ads and marketing they tried to inject into the questions, and as traffic died off they shut down the site about a year ago. The creator of the site, Ben Brown, had left working on the site in advance forseeing the problems. He was aware that the die-hard audience for the site would need a place to go once consumating was shuttered, and so he created a new site called goteaminternet.com which is a sortof tumblr/twitter-hybrid.
New Life
To celebrate the creation of the new site, I threw together a theme song for it as one of my final consumating.com question of the week answers. Here is that song and here is the video I made to accompany it.
Hard Truth
Go Team Internet did not turn out to be quite the creative lab that consumating was. Thumb-ratings are still there but barely used and there are no questions to spur content creation unless people write their own. As a result, most of the postings are memes and whining, like the rest of the community-based-internet. The users do share a bond, having been mostly ex-consumators, so the site can at times feel like a retirement home full of folks talking about the good old days, shunning new users and creating drama to keep things interesting. That said, I visit every day keeping up with old friends and enjoying the occassional spark of genius that I remember from those days passed.
The Songsmith
Recently, one user suggested we make a new themesong using Microsoft Songsmith, an application that receives a vocal track and creates accompanying music based on the notes it detects in it. There are plenty of instances of this on youtube created using the vocal-tracks to existing popular songs, so i went ahead and tried my hand using the vocal track from the GT! theme.
New Song Versions by Microsoft Songsmith
Here’s the ‘pop’ version.
[audio:http://homeworkparty.com/projects/songsmith/gtipop.mp3]
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Here’s the Honky-Tonk version.
[audio:http://homeworkparty.com/projects/songsmith/gtihonky.mp3]
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Here’s the most random one I could make by pushing the limits of listenablilty.
[audio:http://homeworkparty.com/projects/songsmith/gtihip.mp3]
Conclusion
Songsmith is a pretty neat little gadget, and seems a bit too creative/useless to have been made by Microsoft. It comes with a 6 hour demo and after that you have to pay $30, so I guess that’s what makes it a Microsoft joint.
