The first of my new projects to launch this year, A Lesser Photographer is a site for minimalist photographers. Actually, it's more about producing the best possible results from the least of equipment. 

The web has become cluttered with sites preaching to photographers about bigger and badder gear to perform mostly unnecessary and unoriginal tasks for the typical photographer. An alternative voice is needed.

Occasionally, I try to explain the benefits of clarity over simplicity to designers and writers. I mostly get blank stares. So, to better illustrate, imagine you need to know what time it is.

This is simplicity:

And this is clarity:

And this is what most web designers and writers would offer as a solution:

It's been a year or so since I started closing down my websites and stopped publishing my books, in the hopes of finding new obsessions. So, where has it taken me?

I've come up with around 100 new product/content ideas. 10 of them were promising enough to prototype. In the coming months, I'll be debuting some of the more interesting projects. So, if you're in the market for some clever products and websites for smartasses and writers, stayed tuned. Subscribe to my RSS or Twitter feed and I promise it'll never be boring.

I did an interview a few days ago about the demise of the Music Press Report and plans for the future. It's now up at Music As Follows. The interviewer's primary language is Spanish, so a little is lost in the translation. One question was about why I closed it down:

It was out of pure frustration. Music journalism has always been treated as a lower class form of journalism. The amount of pay and respect was lower than any other form of journalism and music journalists played the part. The vast majority now see it as more of a hobby than career - and maybe that's the way it should be - but the Music Press Report definitely approached it as a vital, important area of journalism. That was not the view of the majority of the readers.

I was also asked if there was a future for the publication:

I would love to do something more in-depth, but there has to be an audience for it and I'm not sure there is anymore. This kind of site takes huge amounts of time and energy, as I'm sure you know. I'd like to know if anyone still cares.

The truth is creating your own editorial site is a lot of fun. There's a lot of responsibility, but when readers respond to your writing, it's well worth the effort. I would like to resurrect the Music Press Report someday, but there's a lot I would change.

I uploaded the most updated version of the Van Halen Encyclopedia as a free eBook on Google Books. However, Google has decided, instead, that they had permission to publish an older version of the book. Coincidentally, this version is the version for sale on Amazon.com (which apparently Google Books affiliate links to). I'm not sure I can do anything at this point to remove the older, inferior edition from Google, but a free copy of the most up-to-date version can always be found at Lulu.com.