All change

Well I'm sure you've noticed that I haven't posted anything here in ages. I've been busy with studying and I've also lost much of my interest in Jewel. But now I'm back! Hopefully I'll be posting again more regularly. What will I be posting about? There won't be much Jewel unless it directly affects the UK. As I say on my Twitter profile...

It's Pieces Of UK, Rationalism, Maths, Linguistics, Music, Technology, Learning, Trivia, and maybe a bit of Jewel!

Jewel develops, keeps hard-core fan base by allowing greater access via Internet

Recently, she asked fans to point her to songs posted online -- and now she has 30 to 50 new recordings.

Jewel had totally forgotten some of those songs.

"There's one or two where I felt like somebody else must have wrote these and body-snatched me or something," Jewel tells me, laughing.

Read more at ReviewJournal.com

Crown Jewel

Genre-bending Jewel’s concerts bring together gays, bikers, and conservatives, but her something-for-everyone persona doesn’t keep her from having opinions on gay marriage, Sarah Palin, and Lady GaGa.

Read more at Advocate.com

Jewel gives career advice to up-and-coming singer/songwriters

"I think that one thing people should know is a manager should never get more than 15 percent. I have a friend that just is – it looks like he’s going to have a really big career. He just made his record – it hasn’t come out yet – and his manager is charging him 20 percent, and it makes me crazy. It’s stealing."


Watch the videos at Mindopia.

At Home with Jewel and Ty Murray

"I love fabric," admits Jewel, here in the master bedroom with Ty. "But I've seen women completely take over a house to where it doesn't look like there's a man living there. I didn't want to do that."

Read more at AOL.com

The future of Jewel - Pieces of UK

I've just uploaded a new Beta version of my site which I've been developing recently. It's very experimental and in its early stages of development, but contains a number of ideas that I've been playing around with. If you want to follow its progress then I'll be posting details of future updates on my twitter feed. A brief summary follows...

JewelTube

is my new version of the youTube player. It was written using the YouTube APIs and Tools. New features are multi-lingual lyrics and skip points. There aren't many videos available at the moment as a number of Jewel videos have been removed from youTube recently and also it will only work with embeddable videos.

Visualizations

written using the Google Visualization API will give a graphical view of a number of Jewel statistics. At the moment there are two visualizations: songs by year, so you can see when Jewel was most prolific and when she was taking a break; albums by setlist, is Jewel still performing more songs from Pieces of You than any other album? More visualizations will be created soon.

Calendar
Past and future concert and TV details with a monthly view or a list view. Also has an option to view album by setlist visualizations. Currently only goes back to 2007, but more years will be added soon.

Songs
A Jewel song database with a visual tag interface. It allows you to select songs using various criteria eg songwriter; genre; album. At the moment this is far from complete, I've still to add a lot more data.

Jewel in a wheelchair filming a soup commercial

"Fame Pictures said that while filming She acted like she was biting the can top off the soup can and then pouring it down the hatch of a mailbox."

More photos at the Busy Bee Blogger.