prolific.org

No, not to throw him in, don’t be cruel.

Phil Romans has organised the 2nd photo auction in support of the African Well Fund’s ‘Build a Well for Bono’s Birthday’. Last year, his efforts raised $11,000 for the charity.

The African Well Fund is a registered 501(c)3 non-profit organization that was founded in 2002 by a group of U2 fans. Since that time, AWF has raised more than $300,000, which has been used to fund clean water projects that have benefited over 60,000 people in sub-Saharan Africa.

Nineteen U2 fans and photographers (including myself) have donated over 100 pictures of the band (and one of one of their best friends) to be auctioned off on eBay. All proceeds will be donated to the 5th Annual Build a Well for Bono’s Birthday fundraising drive.

The photo auction starts April 14th, and will last for 7 days. The first auction starts at 12pm EST, and each auction will subsequently start at one minute increments.

Go check out the photos and put in your bids. If I may make a suggestion: this photograph by some Dutch woman would be a fine choice.

And so the madness begins, again: U2 Tour dates announced.

Tomorrow morning 10 AM, pre-sales for some of these concerts start. Hundreds of hardcore fans will be going insane, click-click-clicking, trying to score tickets (registered fans are allowed 2 to 4 tickets for one single show) through the abominable Ticketmaster sites. I’m sad to say they’ve taken over handling in my part of the world too.

The object of the operation? Get tickets that allow you inside the oval. In the USA, these are the cheapest tickets. What the pricing in Europe will be, I’m not sure yet.

I had planned a trip to IKEA today, for CD cases and a dining table, but on second thought that money will be needed to fund this year’s U2 trek: Brussels, Gelsenkirchen, London, Paris, Amsterdam and maybe more. New York, perhaps, in November or so.

Looks like my 2005 is all mapped out.

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When Job, guitarist of ‘Lawn’, asks the audience to be quiet because, you know, it’s a quiet song, he does so with the confidence of a seasoned performer. Not the kind of thing you expect from a support act in a tiny club. Not in front of a crowd that’s already shown considerable acceptance of the band eventhough they’re there to see the main act ‘Sophia’. I’m impressed.

{ Lawn, Tivoli – de Helling, Utrecht }

A lot of people around us are dressed in dark red colours. We can’t figure out why. Perhaps it’s some thing fans of bands do, some quirk like The Mission fans who called themselves ‘Eskimos’ or the early online community of U2 fans who took to wearing tags with the name of their mailing list written on it.

Or it could be they’re dressed in red to go along with the Fire-engine themed ‘disco’ that’s planned after the gig.

I didn’t know ‘Sophia‘, but I knew their predecessor, noise-mongers the God Machine. They had impressed me as a young band, having made the decision to live and record in London rather than stay in their native America. I remember that the death of their bassist came unexpected and that I felt so sorry at a time that a band that had seemed so promising would meet such ill fate.

Robin Proper-Sheppard, the God Machine and Sophia’s front-man, nearly gave up music after his friend died, but in the end decided he could not live without it. He looks like a young David Brent with a little Sean Penn on the side. When he’s on stage pre-show to set up some girls, fans, comment “Oh there he is!”, adding with a certain air of disappointment, “He’s not even wearing performance clothes…”

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I was skeptical about Friendster from my very first invitation on the day it launched. I joined kicking and screaming and never did anything with it. Friendster and its clones seemed primarily dating sites to me. I am not comfortable (in real life and online) in social environments. Making small talk online is as hard for me as it is off line so I wouldn’t naturally join any site of its kind. I opted out of Orkut.

But Flickr’s a little different. I joined despite its somewhat unfortunate name (especially in Dutch) because I “trust” the people behind it. Though Ludicorp’s GNE wasn’t my thing, it was extremely slick. It made Flickr worth checking out.

Now I’ve seen the light.

First of all, Flickr looks all kinds of sexy, runs smoothly (a few beta hiccups here and there) and so far it’s been very easy to find my way around. It did take me a while to figure out there was more to it than the Groups and userpages and how to launch Flickr proper. I guess the huge pink button escaped my view…

I soon caught on that Flickr is useful outside the dreaded ‘networking’ area. I still have problems with the whole ‘friends’ issue. (“One or two e-mails and a night on IRC don’t make you my friend.”) This may wholly be a cultural difference, as others have noted. Fortunately there’s an ‘acquaintance’ designation in Flickr. But it is Flickr’s image sharing tools in combination with chat and IM that could be very useful to communities like the one we have at U2log.com.

Next year, U2 will start touring again. (U2 fans, don’t laugh — let’s just hope they will.) Flickr will make it very easy (think ‘effortless’) for fans to share their photos immediately after and during the shows (using mobile phones and Flickr’s ‘upload by e-mail’ service ) in the chat and IM environments.

Using Flickr this way can be quite useful to me, current author of “U2 Live: A Concert Documentary”. I could verify events taking place at concerts. Fans will be able to tell me their stories and illustrate them at the same time. All this makes my information gathering for the book a lot easier.

I’ve set up a U2logTalk group at Flickr.com — hopefully the U2log.com readership will ‘get it’ and join. I’m not saying it will all happen the way I dreamed it up, but it might.

‘Course they’ll all start discussing B’s hair, rather than provide me with essential concert details…