Palenists photo by ahockley

On Thursday June 4th here at Nemo we hosted a discussion in partnership with Group Y, with the tongue-in-cheek title Who Killed Social Media. [Audio stream of the event is here.]

The panel comprised of myself, Dave Allen (@DaveAtFight : Fight – [Update] Co-Founder, Fight LLC : James Todd (@jwtodd : twine.com) – Software Engineer at Radar Networks, for Twine, Matt Savarino (@Ridertech : ridertech.com) – Lead Information Architect at K2 Sports and creator of Ridertech, Lee Crane (@leecrane : leecrane.com) – an action sports online veteran along with Tony ‘Frosty’ Welch, Web, Community and Social Media Strategy Personal Systems Group at HP, Community Manager for theNextBench.com (@frostola : frostyland.com). The panel was moderated by Marshall Kirkpatrick, VP at ReadWriteWeb (@marshallk : readwriteweb)

We had a very lively discussion based around my belief that the term ‘Social Media’ is best left for marketers to use as they mistakenly consider social media a sales ‘channel.’ I prefer to think about the ‘Social Web’ starting with the premise that anyone who opens up a browser is participating in it. It is no longer about platforms such as Facebook or MySpace, it is not about confusing Twitter as a social network, it is about how Reputation Management is now critical and necessary and also how you handle your brand’s ‘Experiential Awareness’ as I call it. Google is moving into the social web space – as Frosty notes in a follow up post after the event: “You may ask yourself why Google has decided to add more weight to the social web. The answer in my opinion is that they realize that when a viral event is happening, people aren’t using Google to find out about it. Instead they turn to the searches on Facebook, Twitter, Digg and YouTube.”

A glaring example of what people are saying can be found by looking into the eMusic fiasco. I believe that the firestorm of criticism that eMusic came under from its subscriber base could have been avoided entirely if the company had simply taken out an insurance policy in the form of a Community Manager. Think about that next time you try to persuade reluctant executives that Community Manager is a real job, and if they still baulk tell them its not a salary but a business expense – online community insurance! eMusic failed at Reputation Management on the Social Web. I sensed that the audience in the room resonated with the idea of insurance – especially post the Dominos pizza melt down.

The most contentious point of the night, one that caused audible groans in the audience, came from Frosty – “SEO or SEM, in my opinion, will be dead as you know it within 6 months.” It was a powerful statement that he backed up later in a post – “I didn’t make this statement for a wow or shock factor, but because it’s something I believe. Also I don’t believe its a new revelation. If you keep up with Steve Rubel (@steverubel : Micro Persuasion), Jeremiah Owyang (@jowyang : Web Strategy) and others, you can see where the social web is heading, and what impact it is going to have. Especially on search.”

Clearly Frosty has opened the bottle and the genie can’t be put back in. Read all of his thoughts on the subject here.

More links:
Semantics Killed Social Media
Social media kills SEO
Transcript of the Panel

Search the thread on Twitter: #whokilledsm

Click image to play

As Dave continues the test drive he took the Lincoln MKS out to Portland International Airport to pick up his friend, the acclaimed Belgian electronic artist, Von Von Von, who has just returned from exile in Europe. Hear what Von has to say about coming out of exile and what he thinks of the Lincoln MKS…

Click image to watch the video.

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The Lincoln MKS (left) the acclaimed Von Von Von (right)

The Ford Motor Company and their Lincoln division have chosen Nemo’s Dave Allen as a ‘digital influencer’ and handed him the keys to a fancy red Lincoln MKS for a few days. Dave was tracked down by Ford through his highly trafficked music blog, Pampelmoose, that he runs for Nemo. Dave will be in full Top Gear mode for the next three days as he runs around Portland. Yesterday Dave used the car to pick up the acclaimed Belgian New Wave electronic artist, Von Von Von, from Portland International Airport and we will shortly be posting a video of that trip. Stay tuned for all the pics and video and a final overview of the driving experience from Dave.

It doesn’t seem that long ago since Radiohead did what was once unimaginable – release an album without being signed to a major record company. On the long march to digital ubiquity as the means of music delivery Radiohead avoided the tar pit that seems to be major label thinking and came out clear winners. Yes, they resorted later to releasing the album as a good old CD into regular retail distribution but they were pioneers and were soon followed with great success by Nine Inch Nails and to lesser success by many others. Both these bands had an understanding of what their fans wanted [price level choice, quality and special packaging] and both bands understood the power of the internet for marketing purposes and direct reach. [NB: Although I believe that the digital music file will rule the day, vinyl still has a role to play and I'll get to that later.]

The most interesting part of this experiment [which at the time, I would argue it was] was not only that it was wildly successful but it laid the groundwork for what I have coined the end of the organizing principle. In other words I suggest that we are now seeing the end of the album-length work as the permenant work, the everlasting body of work that represents the pinnacle of an artists’ creativity. I am fully expecting to hear the howls of derision over this but bear with me.

Radiohead

If you were honest how many albums do you own that demand to be listened to from beginning to end? AV Club recently came up with a list of 25, some of which I agree with and Rolling Stone, Spin and other mags regularly post their lists of the “all time greatest albums” whether its 100 or 50 or less. My band Gang Of Four’s album Entertainment! is often featured on these lists but take it from me it has its flaws. The problem with lists and suggestions is that they are all subjective. Being engaged by music requires too much of a personal commitment on an emotional level for anyone to be able to provide an ultimate list. [Imagine if an art critic attempted to make a top ten list of the world's greatest paintings. Why does popular music suffer from this conceit?]

We live in an era of MP3 players, streaming internet radio, web apps – not to mention the iTunes music application and its ability to shuffle your entire digital music collection – now the cloud and almost-mobile ubiquity, the list goes on; in what part of digital music culture does an album-length piece of work now reside?

I’ll answer that question – I believe it has no place in a digital future.

The original organizing principle of music was of course hand written, composed. It then moved along to sheet music and with that came revenue from sales to the musical public and by so doing helped to move revenue income beyond just ticket sales to the opera or orchestra performances. This wasn’t enough though. It was as if music was demanding to be organized and soon enough inventors jumped in to the fray and began organizing music recording and playback – at first on tin foil.

“From the earliest phonographs in 1877, courtesy of Mr. Thomas A. Edison, the cylinder was the preferred geometric form for a sound recording. The first records were made on strips of tinfoil, the predecessor of household aluminum foil, wrapped around a 4-inch diameter drum. The drum was hand-cranked at about 60 revolutions per minute (RPM) and the phonographic apparatus made sound impressions upon the foil. The expected lifetime of a foil recording was short because after a few playbacks the sound impressions were either worn down or the foil had ripped.” [Source: Tinfoil.com]

And then along came the wax cylinder which turned out to be too fragile for popular use. Music lovers had to wait until 1930 which was when RCA Victor launched the first commercially available vinyl long-playing record, marketed as “Program Transcription” discs. These revolutionary discs were designed for playback at 33⅓ rpm and pressed on a 30 cm diameter flexible plastic disc. [Source: Wikipedia]

Technically then, we can say that 1930 was the year that the organizing principle for the length of a popular music album was implemented, and with the advent of that organizing principle it is worth noting that musical artists had no control over the length of time their masterpiece would run; they were at the mercy of contemporary technology. Album length, roughly 35 minutes over two sides of vinyl, was simply a decision made by technologists who did not consult artists. [The gatefold sleeve containing double and triple albums became the norm later for rock bands with more to say - for better or worse.]

If musicians and bands were not part of this decision in the first place then why would they complain of what modern technology now brings – their craft has been unchained from early technological limitations and they now have endless amounts of time and bandwidth to spread their creative message far and wide; along with unfettered artistic control.

The Browser is The New iPod.

On March 24th I attended the Leadership Music Digital Summit in Nashville as a speaker. That morning I heard the keynote speech by Rio Caraeff, EVP eLABS at the Universal Music Group. The stand out phrase from him that resonated with me was “the browser is the new iPod.”

The Byrds – Photo Ed Caraeff

He spoke of lamenting the loss of the experiential and tactile nature of recorded music; he missed the tactile experience of music delivered in its vinyl and cardboard form [his father was the famous album sleeve art director, Ed Caraeff.] The digital file, he argued, had stripped the experience from the music; listening to music was now a flat and unemotional activity compared with holding a well-designed sleeve filled with images, lyrics and artwork. Because of this flat experience he predicted that there would be no future for selling recorded music directly to music fans.

He mentioned one area of success for Universal; the advent of the video game. An all-encompassing experiential medium that included more than just the games – the games came with a community of like-minded people and music. They also generate millions of dollars especially through the subscription fees that are required for online gaming activity.

Welcome to the Cloud

With his phrase ‘The browser is the new iPod’ Caraeff alludes to the ubiquitous access that we have to music. The browser is no longer limited to laptop or desktop computers – mobile devices have browsers too and in the case of the iPhone the music apps have been wildly successful. 4G promises to expand music delivery to mobile users even farther. Very soon there will be even less reason to ‘own’ music as it will be easily available at our fingertips everywhere. The cloud is the perfect place for storing your music collection. All of the above condemns the album to the trash can of history, it also suggest that online music subscription services may finally gain the upper hand.

So what are musicians to do?

First they must put nostalgia, tradition and the old business models and paradigms far behind them. They must, as Umair Haque argues with regard to any business – provide something of value. Haque also pushes the concept of ‘ideals’ – “because they are what ensure the value we are creating is authentic, deep, meaningful value — not just the shabby, threadbare illusion of value.” [Ideals were sorely lacking when the labels sold CDs full of filler for $18.99.]

Humans are subconsciously moved by the emotion of music, it provides a link to their ancestry and to their tribes, it stirs not only positive but sometimes negative feelings linked to moments in time and is often steeped in nostalgia and memories. No other art form is ‘consumed’ as broadly and passionately as music on a daily basis around the world.

How music was delivered used to be in the hands of the few – bands, concert promoters, record companies and their retail distribution companies, radio, and video shows such as MTV. In tech-speak this system embraced ‘push’ – we the mighty and powerful will “provide you” [at a price determined by "us"] with access to our treasures when “we” feel like it. These days that system is rapidly breaking down as music fans now ‘pull’ what “they” want to listen to.

Control has moved from the few to the millions of many. Dull labels and dull bands offering dull, flat, non-experiential product – e.g. a CD, will go the way of the CD as it goes the way of the Dodo. Consider what Cirque Du Soleil provides as an experience compared to Barnum and Bailey’s circus. Or Burning Man compared to your average music festival. Even the Las Vegas Beatles-themed show ‘Across The Universe’ wipes the floor with most rock concerts these days.

Music fans are no longer patiently waiting for their favorite bands to deliver new music according to the old customary cycle – album, press release, video, radio, tour. No, the fan base has to be regularly and consistently engaged. Some Ideas:

• First, communicate openly and ask your fans what they want from you
• Listen to what they have to say. Really listen
• Provide unique content such as early demos of new songs
• Never under estimate the power of a free MP3
• Forget completely the idea of an organizing principle. Invent a new one
• Use social media wisely. Twitter and Facebook Pages are best, MySpace is too cluttered
• Don’t push messages to your fans, have a two way interaction with them
• Invite them to share, join, support and build goodwill with you
• Scrap your web site and start a blog
• Remember to forget everything you know about the CD “business”
• Start to monetize the experience around your music
• Remember – the browser is the new iPod

And finally I leave you with one organizing principle that works as a tactile and experiential format and gives great pleasure – the vinyl album. Having said that I do not want to contradict any part of this article as I do not suggest using vinyl as a format for delivering an album-length piece of work. I do suggest using vinyl for the physical manifestation of your demos, out takes, live tracks etc, and always accompany it with a coupon for free download of any related digital product.

Related Links:

My Love of Vinyl Records
The End of the CD and CD Retailers
Puddlegum – Top 5 Reasons Why Vinyl Will Outlive CDs
David Byrne Tells The Record Labels to Embrace The MP3
How Killing the CD Single Killed the Recording Industry
How Bands Can Make More Money By Not Pricing Their Merchandize at Shows

Ok, this is a fascinating rant from Robert Scoble. His list of the newspaper industry’s woes, and in some cases unforgivable missteps, when presented like this could take your breath away. Yet all is not quite what it seems – e.g. the Huffington Post is a news aggregator and walks a fine line in repurposing other news outlets’ content. Google and Yahoo are search engines linking back to the newspaper’s sites etc, etc, but there is a point here – the newspaper industry [rather like the music industry] would have preferred that the internet would have just curled up and died – unfortunately it didn’t and it won’t….plan B anyone?

All the text below this line is from Scobleizer the blog:

The newspaper industry just gave away another free meal, er Twitter: do they have any left?
I’m listening to Dave Winer and Jay Rosen “reboot the news.” Jay is a journalism professor and Dave is a geek that helped either birth or bootstrap all sorts of publishing technologies including blogging, RSS, OPML, XML-RPC, and more. So, hearing the two of them do an audio podcast every Sunday is very interesting.

I’ve been pretending in my head that I’m a newspaper exec. When I do that I keep beating myself around the face. Why? Because the newspaper industry keeps giving the geeks free meals. Let’s study the free meals:

Free meal #1. Giving away classified advertising to Craig’s List.
Free meal #2. Giving away photography to Flickr (look at the photos from the Chinese Earthquake, why didn’t this happen on a newspaper branded site?).
Free meal #3. Giving away front page news to blogs like Huffington Post.
Free meal #4. Giving away “small” community news like births, deaths, birthdays, etc to Facebook.
Free meal #5. Giving away real-time news to Twitter.
Free meal #6. Giving away news distribution to Google News and Amazon Kindle, among others. With new sites like Kosmix coming on strong (hundreds of percent of growth month over month).
Free meal #7. Giving away restaurant reviews to Yelp.
Free meal #8. Giving away traffic information to Google Maps.
Free meal #9. Giving away celebrity news to Facebook and Twitter. (Why is Oprah on both of those, and why didn’t the newspaper industry lock up Oprah and keep her on a newspaper brand?)
Free meal #10. Giving away local news to Topix (at least that was funded by a newspaper brand).
Free meal #11. Giving away business news to Yahoo Finance and Google Finance (and something new that will get announced tomorrow).
Free meal #12. Giving away news ranking to Memeorandum.
Free meal #13. Giving away astrology to Astrology.com.
Free meal #14. Giving away comics to Comics.com.

What is their latest giveaway? Crowd-sourced news. I visit Twitter Search every day to find out what is “hot news.” That’s something I used to look at newspapers and older media for (radio, TV) but Twitter is just plain better at telling me what is trending.

OK, so now my face is bloody because I’m seeing all the things the newspaper industry gave away. Do they have anything left to give away?

YES!

Read the rest of this very lengthy post here….

Some bullet points from the interview:

• 53% of surveyed marketers will increase spending on social media
• He quotes John Schwartz who predicted that firewalls would be extinct in the near future
• Jeremiah maintains that crowdsourcing support, and other functions, will be a fruitful area
• Looking at Forrester itself, Jeremiah revealed that only 18% of the company is active in one project, the in house use of Yammer as a microstreaming platform. They are seeing good productivity paybacks from remaining connected, asking questions, and getting responses in real-time. Still, it will take a while to get real support from senior management.
• Regarding microstreaming (Yammer, et al), Jeremiah thinks they are more natural to business people than blogs. He very naturally transitioned from that into a discussion about mobility and presence, which I have long considered the killer aspect of IM
• The speed of social technologies adoption has been enormously fast, and will become ubiquitous in five years, and in ten years, we won’t use the term Enterprise 2.0 anymore.

Leave it to Billboard Magazine, a scion of the fading music industry, to resort to old media tactics. This editorial on their web site is worthy of discussion but unless you happen to subscribe to the magazine for $24.95 a month you do not have the ability to comment. Clearly what happens as a result of this madness is that Billboard’s music business subscribers can hold up this editorial as a sign of “things aren’t so bad after all chaps…” and then continue to ignore the future of their business whilst looking backwards at the good old days. [Ironic note: check the image above and note the arrow in the right corner and the line 'Teen music spending drops.']

It’s not my ego nudging me to write that I can’t help thinking Steven Wilson is talking about my article, ‘The End of the Album as The Organizing Principle‘ when he sarcastically writes about ‘industry experts’ here – “Reports that CD sales continue to decline—they fell 14% in 2008 compared with 2007—have once again inspired a pundit-led roll call of the music industry’s dead and dying institutions: major labels, record stores, terrestrial radio and the CD itself, to name but a few. Recently added to the obituary page is the album itself, thanks to industry “experts.” However, I’m happy to say that the reports of the album’s death are greatly exaggerated.”

I am pleased to say I don’t consider myself an ‘industry expert,’ at least not a ‘music industry expert.’ Although I have had a long career as a professional musician [Gang of Four, Shriekback] and have run record labels etc, I would rather be remembered for jumping feet first into the future of music by joining eMusic.com as GM in 1998.

Unfortunately Wilson’s editorial completely ignores what is actually happening at the MP3 stores that he mentions – Amazon MP3 Store and Apple’s iTunes – music fans are buying more single tracks and not so many albums. He recognizes that the vinyl album is making inroads into the market place once again but he misses the point about the end of the organizing principle whilst admitting that people don’t have the attention span these days – “When the computer becomes a listener’s main source of listening to music, it’s hard to focus for 40 minutes, let alone 70.” It’s not about the computer Steven, it’s all about the Cloud and what Rio Caraeff, EVP of Universal Music’s eLABS understands when he says “the browser is the new iPod.” The browser is everywhere on almost all mobile devices, millions of them around the world – and users are not listening to album after album on them, most likely they are listening to their own playlists.

And here’s Wilson’s killer ‘make the recording industry feel better’ moment – “…. the argument that technology killed the album is a diversion—the mere availability of downloadable music is irrelevant to the question of the format’s viability.” The part of that statement that I have bolded out is simply an idiotic statement.

Technology doesn’t kill anything. In fact it moves things forward. For artists, technology and the advent of almost ubiquitous broadband has brought unparalleled freedom of expression. I wrote in my article, with regard to the early technologists who devised the album-length organizing principle, that – …..musicians and bands were not part of that decision in the first place then why would they complain of what modern technology now brings – their craft has been unchained from early technological limitations and they now have endless amounts of time and bandwidth to spread their creative message far and wide; along with unfettered artistic control.

I also wrote –
How music was delivered used to be in the hands of the few – bands, concert promoters, record companies and their retail distribution companies, radio, and video shows such as MTV. In tech-speak this system embraced ‘push’ – we the mighty and powerful will “provide you” [at a price determined by "us"] with access to our treasures when “we” feel like it. These days that system is rapidly breaking down as music fans now ‘pull’ what “they” want to listen to.

Control has moved from the few to the millions of many. Dull labels and dull bands offering dull, flat, non-experiential product – e.g. a CD, will go the way of the CD as it goes the way of the Dodo. Consider what Cirque Du Soleil provides as an experience compared to Barnum and Bailey’s circus. Or Burning Man compared to your average music festival. Even the Las Vegas Beatles-themed show ‘Across The Universe’ wipes the floor with most rock concerts these days.

If these ideas and opinions, not to mention the debate around them, are ignored, then the recording industry and Billboard Magazine will definitely follow the CD into extinction…

[*NB: The idea of the collapse of newspapers is moving at the speed of light across the 'net. In the hour since I posted this opinion I came across multiple arguments, all very succinct. Here's one from David Eaves - Newspapers' Decline is a Sign of Democracy's Health not a Symptom of its Death. I will attempt to keep this piece updated as the conversation rolls out.]

Jay Rosen on the Huffington Post Investigative fund.

[Latest edit March 29th 12:17PM PST]

Having spent the last decade [at least] discussing the major label recording industry’s supreme mishandling of how its customers embraced the digital music file and how they quickly became savvy internet users sharing those files with millions of other users – basically penalizing the industry for scrapping the single and charging too much for an inferior product, the CD – my interest now turns to the fate of the newspaper industry.

There are some parallels across each of these industry’s woes but it is worth pointing out that the newspaper industry is not being penalized by its customers [readers] for doing anything wrong ala the music industry [weak overpriced product, suing its customers,] rather newspapers are victims of circumstance; technology, shifting reader habits and ubiquitous access in an increasingly mobile world. Unlike the music industry they were not late to the online game even though their initial foot-dragging suggested that like the music industry they would much rather wish the internet would go away.

I must give credit to the labels as I sense that they are beginning to find new routes to profits from music sales. At a recent music industry conference in Nashville I listened to Rio Caraeff, EVP eLabs at Universal Music Group, give the keynote speech. He lamented the loss of the experiential, tactile nature of recorded music when it came in its vinyl form [his father was a famous album sleeve director.] The digital file, he argued, had stripped the experience from the music – listening to music was now a flat and unemotional activity compared with holding a well-designed sleeve filled with images, lyrics and artwork. Because of this flat experience he predicted that there was no future for selling recorded music directly to music fans.

He mentioned one area of success for Universal; the advent of the video game. An all-encompassing experiential medium that included more than just the games – the games came with a community of like-minded people and music. They also generate millions of dollars especially through the subscription fees that are required for online gaming activity.

He also said “the browser is the new iPod.”

So, how does the newspaper industry embrace the browser, what does its “video game” look like?

Umair Haque

The first thing that they must do is abandon the old business models as an idea. Those models can not be re-created for the web. As Umair Haque writes on the Harvard Business blog – “companies and investors focused on business models are simply applying yesterday’s obsolete logic to today’s novel problems.” He goes on to point out that nowadays it is about “making something valuable” – “When we can make valuable stuff, there are a plethora of business models to choose from, some old, some new, some untested, some tried and true. When we can’t, no amount of business model innovation can save us from implosion.”

Referring to Caraeff’s contention that the experience around music is what we relate to the most, why is it that newspapers, that are experiential and tactile, are struggling to maintain readership offline while attracting millions of readers online? Maybe it is just that news is not sexy. Or as Haque points out do they need to just keep providing “valuable stuff” and scrap old business models?

Here’s the quandary – newspapers have to shoulder the enormous burden of overhead required to run a newsroom that collects the news in the first place. What is clear is that the online advertising dollars for newspapers are not filling the gap in the loss of revenue that occurred in print editions – just as digital music sales are not replacing the sales of CDs. So should newspapers start to charge for access to their websites?

Clay Shirky

I have been following the thought leader and writer Clay Shirky via his web site and Jay Rosen, who teaches journalism at NYU, via Twitter. Both of these men have strong opinions about the future of news media, note news media not necessarily newspapers. At the recent SXSW Interactive conference that I attended, Shirky showed the audience a slide that read – the internet is the largest group of people who care about reading and writing ever assembled in history…. A simple and very accurate statement. We have ubiquitous and easy access to more text now than ever; it just needs to be filtered. Which is what newspapers always did for us – as the New York Times masthead proclaims still ‘All the news that’s fit to print.’

Should newspapers be allowed to die? What would replace them?

Jay Rosen

There have been many arguments about the end of newspapers. Shirky himself has said that “we don’t need newspapers we need journalism.” Jay Rosen pointed out [Edit: Jay Rosen pointed out to me that he's not the source of this info. I'll find out who said this.] recently that there are on average about five major breaking news stories each day in the USA. These five stories are covered by all of the country’s large newspapers. [Can not find the source of this information hence the strikethrough.] If that info is true it seems to me to be a massive waste of a lot of newsroom’s energy – should there be a consolidation or does that create the risk of corruption? [Paul Starr, writing in the New Republic thinks corruption will be an issue.] In an odd twist, David Simon the creator of the TV show The Wire, accuses media owners of contempt and is also fearful of corruption in this interview in the Guardian. It’s worth noting that Simon falls foul of Umair Haque’s ‘it’s not about the business model’ credo…

“Oh, to be a state or local official in America over the next 10 to 15 years, before somebody figures out the business model,” says Simon, a former crime reporter for the Baltimore Sun. “To gambol freely across the wastelands of an American city, as a local politician! It’s got to be one of the great dreams in the history of American corruption.”

Should we just turn to the aggregators and news feeds such as Reuters and AP? And of course to the blogs…

The fear of corruption spins mostly on the axis of believing our government would have nothing to fear if newspapers disappeared and therefore critical journalism went the way of the Dodo. [Although it's worth noting that those critical journalists all seemed to disappear in the run up to the last Iraq war.] It’s a plausible fear but given the advent of so much transparency and open access to information it may arguably be more difficult not less for governments to control the message. President Obama may be the first president in history to have fully embraced the internet during his election campaign and on into the White House but he will continue to be dogged forever by the blogging and tweeting classes throughout his term.

Control is an issue for newspapers today and has been since the early 90’s. Clay Shirky writes in an article Newspapers And Thinking The Unthinkable – “Back in 1993, the Knight-Ridder newspaper chain began investigating piracy of Dave Barry’s popular column, which was published by the Miami Herald and syndicated widely. In the course of tracking down the sources of unlicensed distribution, they found many things, including the copying of his column to alt.fan.dave_barry on usenet; a 2000-person strong mailing list also reading pirated versions; and a teenager in the Midwest who was doing some of the copying himself, because he loved Barry’s work so much he wanted everybody to be able to read it.

One of the people I was hanging around with online back then was Gordy Thompson, who managed internet services at the New York Times. I remember Thompson saying something to the effect of “When a 14 year old kid can blow up your business in his spare time, not because he hates you but because he loves you, then you got a problem.” I think about that conversation a lot these days.”

Rather like the music industry the newspaper industry is faced with multiple problems on many fronts – shrinking readership, ad revenue dropping and a public who feel that information should be free. Perhaps the answer rests with the idea of hyper-local news; news that is directed to people at the zip code level, news that has hyper local resonance to readers. Jay Rosen may be heading in this direction as I noticed that he is tweeting a question – How Many Homegrown News Stories Are In Your Daily Paper?

My city of Portland has two newspapers – The Oregonian that carries national stories often sourced via AP or the NYT as well as local reporting, and The Portland Tribune, a freesheet that remains hyper-local. The Oregonian is in the unfortunate position of not having its own web site, its news is buried in amongst a site called OregonLive.com yet The Portland Tribune, a smaller and perhaps more nimble operation does have a web site that is kept up to date with only local news. Both of these papers will have to contend with Yelp or Outside.in as well as other hyper-local web sites that directly compete with them for bringing up to the minute breaking news at the zip code level. I suspect that only one of our local papers can survive.

If both of my local papers are searching for monetization through jiggling the business model they will surely fail. Let’s go back to Umair Haque and his idea of new ideals based around scrapping business models:

“Monetizing” + “business models” = zombieconomy. The reason monetization is a dirty word is simple. It blinds us to value creation, at the expense of value capture. When we seek to monetize, we end up chasing the same old lame competitive advantage. I win, you (and you, and you) lose. Put another way: “monetizing” toxic junk — from CDOs, to Hummers, to McMansions, to Big Macs – is how we got into this mess.

It is by rediscovering how to make stuff that’s not toxic junk in the first place that we’ll get out of the mess lame, evil, brain-dead 20th century thinking has left us in. That’s the challenge of a new generation of revolutionaries. And it’s not about new business models: it’s about reconceiving authentic, deep, value creation.”

Finally I’ll end with another thought from Clay Shirky – “When reality is labeled unthinkable, it creates a kind of sickness in an industry. Leadership becomes faith-based, while employees who have the temerity to suggest that what seems to be happening is in fact happening are herded into Innovation Departments, where they can be ignored en masse. This shunting aside of the realists in favor of the fabulists has different effects on different industries at different times. One of the effects on the newspapers is that many of their most passionate defenders are unable, even now, to plan for a world in which the industry they knew is visibly going away.”

Other references:

Clay Shirky’s blog

Jay Rosen’s blog

Follow Jay Rosen on Twitter

Jay Rosen on mindcasting.

Umair Haque – Video presentation on Ideals

Uncle Sam The Newspaper Man

David Eaves – The Death of Journalism? [Or journalism in the Era of Open]

Follow Nemo on Twitter:
NemoHQ
Dave Allen
Trevor Graves
Mark Lewman
Nubby Twiglet

This year’s SXSWi Conference in Austin Texas can only be hailed as a success. I’m unable to distill all the great information that I gleaned into one post so I will spread it out in posts here over the next few days. This year’s speakers included Chris Anderson, Guy Kawasaki and Clay Shirky to name a few. It was Shirky who left me with the most memorable quote of the week – “the internet is the largest group of people who care about reading and writing ever assembled in history…” He was defending internet use against the charge that it was destroying the book publishing and newspaper businesses. The best panels were the ones that included people whose thinking arrived at similar positions – the internet isn’t destroying anything it is merely the great leveler, perhaps the greatest in history.

Austin Kleon, an Austin, TX based illustrator captured the first panel of day one at the conference. This image sums up how I felt at the end of each day of panels…..

I am still reeling after watching the latest amazing “news” piece from Jon Stewart. I wrap “news” in inverted commas because this man is a comedian and a great one at that. So why is he more important than any of the talking heads on cable TV news and political shows?

Here’s why – In an era where newspapers are dying and mainstream TV and cable media are flailing around trying to increase viewers by using limp content, Will Bunch at the Philadelphia Daily News points out that “Great research trumps good access to the powerful.” In essence all Stewart’s team did was juxtapose past remarks on the economy from people like the CEO of Ford or blowhard and so called ’stocks wizard’ Jim Cramer and even bigger blowhard CNBC’s Rick Santelli [who in a magnificent performance gets traders on the floor to boo President Obama because "we shouldn't be paying for those folks who can't pay their mortgages, those losers!"] and compared them to more recent statements to show how hypocritical these people have been and continue to be. Great research all available at any journalist’s fingertips online. Stewart’s team just did the research and then they are not afraid to have Jon go out and skewer these people not lionize them.

You must watch the Stewart video.

And here’s an extract from Will Bunch’s very prescient article:

As briefly noted here earlier, the most talked-about journalism of the day wasn’t produced by the New York Times, CNN, Newsweek or NPR. It was Jon Stewart’s epic, eight-minute takedown on last night’s “Daily Show” of CNBC’s clueless, in-the-tank reporting of inflatable bubbles and blowhard CEOs as the U.S. and world economies slowly slid into a meltdown. You can quibble about Stewart’s motives in starting the piece — after he was spurned for an interview by CNBC’s faux populist ranter Rick Santelli — but you can’t argue with the results.

The piece wasn’t just the laugh-out-loud funniest thing on TV all week (and this was a week in which NBC rebroadcast the SNL “more cowbell” sketch, so that’s saying a lot) but it was exquistely reported, insightful, and it tapped into America’s real anger about the financial crisis in a way that mainstream journalism has found so elusive all these months. As one commenter on the Romenesko blog noted earlier today, “it’s simply pathetic that one has to watch a comedy show to see things like this.”

But that’s not all. The Stewart piece also got the kind of eyeballs that most newsrooms would kill for in this digital age — planted atop many, many major political, media and business Web sites — and the kind of water-cooler chatter that journalists would crave in any age. In a time when newspapers are flat-out dying if not dealing with bankruptcy or massive job losses, while other types of news orgs aren’t faring much better, the journalistic success of a comedy show rant shouldn’t be viewed as a stick in the eye — but a teachable moment. Why be a curmudgeon about kids today getting all their news from a comedy show, when it’s not really that hard to join Stewart in his own idol-smashing game.

Read the rest of the Will Bunch article here. It’s a great read for anyone in media.

Found on Twitter posted by @alisamleo As she says.. “ad-men douchebaggery at its FINEST….”

NYT Geek Team. Pic New Yorker Mag – Mike McGregor

For the newspapers it all comes down to a simple equation – online advertising is not covering the losses of print advertising as circulation drops. This is eerily reminiscent of the recording industry’s woes where digital sales are nowhere near covering the slump of CD sales. [NB: The LA Times says that online ad revenue covers the cost of its online and print editorial teams.]

Let’s not be hasty though. At The New York Times which has been taking a battering lately – its stock is down 60% and it announced plans to mortgage its buildings to raise cash – there is hope, something is stirring. As an article by Emily Nussbaum in New York Magazine points out -

“…. even as the financial pages wrote the paper’s obit, deep within that fancy Renzo Piano palace across from the Port Authority, something hopeful has been going on: a kind of evolution. Each day, peculiar wings and gills poke up on the Times’ website—video, audio, “drillable” graphics. Beneath Nicholas Kristof’s op-ed column, there’s a link to his blog, Twitter feed, Facebook page, and YouTube videos. Coverage of Gaza features a time line linking to earlier reporting, video coverage, and an encyclopedic entry on Hamas. Throughout the election, glittering interactive maps let readers plumb voting results. There were 360-degree panoramas of the Democratic convention; audio “back story” with reporters like Adam Nagourney; searchable video of the debates. It was a radical reinvention of the Times voice, shattering the omniscient God-tones in which the paper had always grounded its coverage; the new features tugged the reader closer through comments and interactivity, rendering the relationship between reporter and audience more intimate, immediate, exposed.”

As an example of how to raise revenue online, David Carr in the NYT argues that there’s a need for an iTunes For News where readers can pay for the news content they want. In response Jack Shafer at Slate says -

“Actually, a flawed iTunes for news already exists: It delivers content through Amazon’s Kindle. The Kindle can download paid subscriptions to the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, the Financial Times, USA Today, the Los Angeles Times, and 12 other dailies via built-in EVDO reception. Newspaper subscriptions run between $5.99 and $13.99 a month.”

He goes on to say that publishers have been promising customers lightweight tablet readers for decades but didn’t deliver so he now suggests that the newspaper owners should jump quickly and produce a Kindle-like device so they can control their own content. Remind you of the music industry anybody?

In the meantime the winds of change seem to be thrashing print media:

Chicago Tribune Goes Tabloid for Single Copy Editions

Web startup to offer foreign news as newspapers cut foreign desks

And magazine’s aren’t immune to the new, new thing either – Really, what is wrong with Vogue?

The printed press continues to suffer. Losses at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer have been mounting year over year since 2000 and last year reached $14 million according to Yahoo Finance. Its owners the Hearst Corporation have put the paper up for sale and, if no buyer is found in 60 days, will close it down.

I feel conflicted over the news of its presumed demise. Newspapers such as the P.I. have long been the backbone of their communities and were the glue that often held those same communities together during the constant ups and downs of civic life. Unfortunately their publishers, journalists and columnists were slow to embrace the realities of the internet and its long reach further down into the zip codes of these newspapers’ former readers. Hyper-local news delivered by web sites such as Yelp and Outside.in, as well as Twitter, may well be the final nail in the coffin for big city newspapers.

The ‘Old Grey Lady,’ the New York Times still trundles along all the while looking over its shoulder. The Times has done a great job of laying out “All the news that’s fit to print” on its website but unfortunately the content is too often weak. As Ana Andjelic points out on her blog i [love] marketing the Times’ regular columnists in Design, Advertising and Fashion seem to be missing the target these days. She uses as an example the Design Observer blog’s response to a recent article by the Times’ Michael Cannell entitled Design Loves a Depression. The design community comes down hard on him – not so much for his article’s premise but for the sin of re-hashing old news – “Design loves a depression? I can assure you that design, along with painting, sculpture, photography, music, dance, fashion, the culinary arts, architecture, and theatre, loves a depression no more than it loves a war, a flood, or a plague. Michael Cannell’s article is regressive and mean-spirited, and it demands a response.”

Bono. Pic Diedre O’Callaghan

And then there’s preaching to the choir. In today’s Times that elder statesman of rock, U2 singer Bono, writes about working with Frank Sinatra. I sincerely hope that this isn’t the Times’ editors’ attempt at appealing to a younger demographic. It’s apparent that Bono has a soft spot for the great man but there’s something inauthentic about how he links the lack of sentimentality in Sinatra’s voice singing ‘My Way’ to the New Year celebrations he witnesses in Dublin – “Is this knotted fist of a voice a clue to the next year? In the mist of uncertainty in your business life, your love life, your life life, why is Sinatra’s voice such a foghorn — such confidence in nervous times allowing you romance but knocking your rose-tinted glasses off your nose, if you get too carried away.

A call to believability. A voice that says, “Don’t lie to me now.” That says, “Baby, if there’s someone else, tell me now.” Fabulous, not fabulist. Honesty to hang your hat on.”

It appears that the multi-millionaire prankster Bono has found the answer to the current climate of economic fear in his own life through the lyrics of ‘My Way.’ Yes its true that Frank sang “I did it My Way” without resorting to nostalgia and fawning sentimentality. He swaggered through the song with a streak of West Coast North American libertarianism, with the can-do spirit of the rugged individual as played in the Westerns of the day by John Wayne. This same ‘can-do’ spirit pervaded the White House during the last 8 years, and that macho spirit didn’t go unnoticed on Wall Street or amongst the banks who were happy to dish out mortgages to people who had no ability to repay them.

“My Way,” that “ode to defiance [that] is four decades old this year,” may thrill Bono but it simply reminds me now of Cheney, Rumsfeld, Bush et al as they poisoned the well of America’s goodwill abroad and helped to set up the massive losses in our financial industries that have already caused pain to millions of Americans here at home.

U2 release their new album, ‘No Line On The Horizon’, in March and I’m confident it will help to line the pockets of the Irish foursome rather handsomely. Unfortunately the refrain for many thousands of displaced Americans, as the fall out from sub-prime mortgage lending continues to take its toll, will be ‘No Home On The Horizon’.

Bono’s rambling, incoherent op-ed piece will be of no use to them. They chose to do it ‘My Way,’ to reach for the American dream, but were blindsided by greed and corrupt practices. And there will be no government bail out for them.

Ironically Twitter had the last word. User @stevenjayl summed up Bono’s op-ed piece rather neatly in a 130 character tweet today -
“Bono has a way with a tune, a presence on the stage, and an embarrassing inability to write a coherent op-ed. NYT: get him an editor!”

Twitter as a social media phenomenon has many people baffled. It simply doesn’t make sense and that’s mainly because most people who decry it don’t understand its considerable potential. One good place for Twitter neophytes to begin would be with Guy Kawasaki’s blog post, How To Use Twitter As A Tool.

Click image to find out

As a tool Twitter has many uses. For instance, one enterprising young woman used Twitter to get a job – “Looking for a new job, Alexa Scordato didn’t email or call her contacts about possible openings. Instead, she messaged them via the social-networking Web site Twitter.com. Her brief message: “Hey there! Looking for a Social Media job up in Boston. Are you guys doing any entry level hires?” Within a week, she had an interview. Within two weeks, she had a job.” But be careful about what you post [or tweet as they say..] to Twitter.

“I would rather see someone who posts good-quality information than what they had for lunch,” said Lindsay Olson, who uses Twitter to recruit for Paradigm Staffing, a staffing agency that focuses on public relations and marketing.” Read the Wall St Journal story here.

And if you have already embraced PR 2.0 at your company then you can discover and follow media people on Twitter here.

Before you know it you’ll be impressing friends and colleagues by your knowledge of TweetDeck.. Follow me on Twitter to see how I use services such as FriendFeed and Tumblr to make using Twitter even easier.

The house slide above Terwilliger

Hyper-local can be summed up easily as ‘all the news in your zip code.’ Wired Magazine Editor-in-Chief Chris Anderson captured it nicely too in a post titled The Vanishing Point Theory of News. The idea of hyper-local is further validated by the success of sites such as Yelp and Outside.in; they drill down to the zip code level to bring us all the news that’s fit to print, or not as the case may be.

I was hiking with my dog in my Hillsdale neighborhood yesterday and some thoughts percolated to top of mind – one being that hyper-local is an awesome idea yet that thought was immediately tempered by the next; hyper-localized information means having easy access to all the news in our communities, we are made aware, therefore we have to accept responsibility for what happens in our communities. There will be no excuses.

I could have stopped right there, it would have been a good Twitter-esque moment. But no. I have actually been paying attention to what goes on in my neighborhood and it’s not always pretty..

From tragedy and despair to new thinking.

No vehicles, a blessing

My regular hike leads from my home in the residential neighborhoods of Portland’s West Hills, down narrow musty lanes and streets to Terwilliger Boulevard [known to locals as the Terwilliger Highway - you may already sense where this is going...]. Where Terwilliger crosses the SW Capitol Highway the road is now closed to vehicles but not to hikers and bicyclists. A few weeks ago a house slid down the hillside that I can see ahead of me taking two others off their foundations as it cascaded toward Terwilliger. Road closed. Despair for the families involved but thankfully no injuries.

The house collapse has created a chain of events that can be seen as an opportunity.

First and foremost, as vehicles can no longer drive along the boulevard it is possible for hikers and bikers to enjoy the serenity of walking Terwilliger’s tree-lined curves without inhaling exhaust fumes or having to be constantly vigilant of motorists speeding to work. Remove the automobile from the equation and we are suddenly back on the path to nature. Of course the traffic has to go somewhere; the detour funnels it through Hillsdale along the increasingly congested Capitol Highway, up through the dangerous cross-section at Sunset Blvd and the Wilson High School entrance, and on back down to the severed umbilical that is Terwilliger where commuters, one to each car, can speed off toward OHSU.

Here’s the opportunity for Hillsdale as I see it: make things difficult for drivers.

Two fairly recent developments in Hillsdale [in the last 4 years] changed the character of the neighborhood – one positively, one negatively. The Hillsdale Library, completed in 2004, is both architecturally and holistically a perfect example of how Hillsdale should be developed. The Watershed building on the other hand is just the opposite. And yet the library, as good as it is, is not perfect.

The library is a wonderful building to look at – a mix of modern eco-friendly materials, an open inviting design that allows complete transparency throughout and although it is a thoroughly modern building it has hints of neo-classical architecture, a good mix for housing the books within. Its problem? It has added to the areas automobile congestion. Drivers attempting to park on the streets or enter the parking lot below the building create mayhem just a half block from the already overloaded intersection at Capitol Highway and Sunset Blvd. And why the library’s underground parking entrance was placed right opposite the parking lots for the Hillsdale Post Office and Liquor Store is beyond me. The pedestrian crosswalk indiscriminately dropped at the corner of the library at the junction of SW DeWitt St has to be the most risky crossing in Hillsdale for the old and young alike.

Meanwhile the Watershed building at the southern end of Hillsdale’s strip malls is an eyesore. [Calling this building the Watershed is apt. Here's one definition of the name's meaning - A critical point marking a change in course or development.] There is nothing to love about this building. Although the ground beneath it was once a brownfield it was at least an open space that afforded a view across Bertha Court to the well-designed public housing just off Bertha Boulevard. The Watershed was perceived with a noble cause – a 51-unit senior affordable housing project – and is also an environmentally-friendly building but it is architecturally dull and has a ludicrous light tower perched on its NW corner that proclaims Hillsdale – such a folly and a waste of money. A retail condominium has lain empty since the buildings’ completion and the low retaining wall that runs along Bertha Court opposite provides a perfect sanctuary for the nicotine-addicted residents to sit and smoke throughout the day. Smoking is a choice and I’m fine with that but it’s a shame that as our local children walk to school they must pass these smokers. This building does not represent the future of Hillsdale.

Back to the problem of cars.

Another Hillsdale development with potential is the advent of the local Farmer’s Market. Along with the Food Front Cooperative taking over the old Wild Oats market, the local community now has easy access to organic foods which in many cases are locally grown. Yet once more the local “planners” failed to estimate the amount of traffic that the Farmer’s Market would create. The entrance to the market across from SW Sunset Blvd and Capitol Highway is now as congested and dangerous to pedestrians on Sundays as it is on weekdays. I don’t see this as progress; the car has dominion over the pedestrian and bicyclist in Hillsdale. Those that think this way will reduce our vibrant urban community to that of a bland, automobile-saturated sprawl reminiscent of the worst of any of Portland’s suburbs. Why doesn’t the Farmers Market and its boosters provide shuttle buses, bike racks and safe pedestrian access?

Shopping local, supporting growers and eating locally grown organic foods are all fine acts but not at the expense of clogging up the community with more cars. Talk about carbon footprint.

To add salt to the wound our hyper-local newspaper the Southwest Community Connection, the same paper that insists on calling the strip malls along Capitol Highway ‘Hillsdale Town Center,’ recently had an article titled ‘A New Look For The Heart of Hillsdale.’ This ‘new look’ according to the architecture and planning firm SERA is a way to “strengthen the qualities of what is Hillsdale” and “to over time create a more focused activity center or plaza.” Business folks in the district are all over it. As happens all too often in Hillsdale, business and automobiles trump residents and community.

The plan as presented by SERA is to create three high-density commercial and residential zones by extending roads through the middle of what is known as the “Sunset Triangle,” some green space that is bordered by Sunset Blvd, Capitol Highway and SW 18th Drive. But don’t worry, the designers “imagine the roads to be tree-lined boulevards with a European air.” If they truly imagined a “European air” they would understand that in Europe buses, light rail, pedestrians and cyclists predominate in towns and villages and many cities – not the automobile. The ‘European’ tag is just pure marketing fluff, an attempt to soften the blow that this development would create in the community.

I presume SERA has already asked the question of Hillsdale’s residents, [although I wasn't included], of what exactly are the strengths of Hillsdale that this phrase invokes – “strengthen the qualities of what is Hillsdale.” If they had asked me I would have these words for its qualities – urban, green, democratic, aesthetic, forward-thinking, family-friendly, bike and pedestrian-friendly, educated, local, supportive….. If they had asked me of my dislikes they would include the ugly buildings that dot Capitol Highway such as the abandoned gas station next to Baskins Robbins, the bizarre architecture that houses the Mexican restaurant Casa Colima, Starbucks [Baker and Spice next door is local and has better coffee,] the traffic, lack of bike lanes and most importantly the nightmare that is the junction at SW Sunset and Capitol Highway – will it take a pedestrian or bicyclist’s death to make someone pay attention?

Nature has a way of dealing. Capitol Hwy in December

Hillsdale simply does not need more businesses and homes crammed into its green spaces. It is hypocritical folly to suggest that the very same decisions that create suburban blight should be made on behalf of Hillsdale’s residents. Hillsdale also does not need to create more roads for automobiles. In fact the community should be doing the exact opposite and work on creating more bike and pedestrian-friendly streets in our neighborhoods.

Here’s a quick example – SW Sunset Blvd. The city should remove all the “traffic calming speed bumps” as they do not work. Drivers have discovered that they are low enough that by speeding up they can clear them more conveniently! The city should put in either stop signs at every junction or traffic circles to slow cars down. It could also narrow the street by putting in chicanes that slow traffic by funneling and are used very efficiently in Europe. Pedestrians and bicyclists should be considered more important than cars…

The Hillsdale District, as it stands today, is a model community. It has the potential to be as strong a destination as the Hawthorne, Clinton and Belmont Districts in SE Portland. It is an urban oasis with charm and character yet it is being blighted by the automobile and wrong-headed thinking such as the idea of under-grounding our utility cables. The money that would be spent on a pet project like that, one that benefits no one, should be put toward a holistic and sensible urban community plan. One that reduces traffic and improves the safety and quality of life for Hillsdale’s residents and those that are attracted to the district as they go about their activities that support local businesses. Filling in our green spaces with more roads and buildings, even if they were “tree-lined boulevards with a European air,” is simply wrong. Cars should come last.

Surely the community of Hillsdale understands that creating more roads and streets for vehicles that burn scarce fossil fuels is a redundant idea – an idea that is not aligned with Hillsdale today nor one that should be in its future.

[where: 6344 SW Capitol Highway, OR 97239]

Here’s a thought… Saturday Night Live viewers surely must consist of a few Becks beer drinkers. Maybe Darius the blogger could take a cue from the show [start by watching it Darius] and notice how successful SNL and NBC have been about getting cool content online really fast…, no blog required, just great, great content. Becks I give you J**z In My Pants from SNL:

I love nothing better on Monday morning than reading Adrants – coffee –> Adrants –> laugh at the fails…no one does it better. Today they cheered me up with their usual sarcastic takedown of a company starting a blog and getting it wrong. I can’t believe that it is almost 2009 and companies are still struggling with the simple idea of how to communicate intelligently with their customers via a two-way communication. It’s not difficult guys… Seriously, some of the quips in this Adrants rap on Becks Beer, Becks Launches a Blog. Gets Everything Wrong, should make me cry not laugh. Check it – some extracts:

Beck’s has launched a blog, Different by Choice. Yawn, right? But the way they’ve announced it and the way it’s formatted is so annoying, it can’t be left alone.

In an email beginning with “Hello Important Marketing Blog People,” Beck’s blogger Darius asks, “has anyone told you recently how hot you are?” and then goes on to explain how he “destroyed” 850 other potential bloggers vying for the job “‘cos that is the way I roll.” Ugh. Cue the Agency.com Subway video.

And then with an ego akin to Sean John believing anyone remotely takes him seriously, Darius prattles on, “This is a novel and let’s face it a brave choice by Beck’s to give me a platform to extol my views and ideals on their global website whilst writing on all that I deem to be ‘Different by Choice.’ Beck’s legal department are bracing themselves for the impending months.”

Ooo. Blogger VS. Lawyer! Hey Darius, that one was played out in 2002.

And if all this weren’t enough to make you want to gag yourself with I AM KING, the entire blog site is in Flash. Yes, a blog in Flash, the worst platform to create anything which requires even the tiniest bit of navigation.

OMG!

Moving towards ‘feels free’ while further devaluing music.

A press release arrived within the email pile today and it trumpeted this – Nokia launches pioneering ‘Comes With Music‘ digital entertainment service. New service offers customers unprecedented freedom and value. EMI Music, independents and music publishers join offering.

Let me take a deep breath here……ok. There’s nothing but hyperbolic exclamations here. I have to ask, why does the music industry continue to shoot itself in the foot? And why, via their mouthpiece the henchmen of the RIAA, do they continue to whine over falling music sales when they happily embrace giving away music? Perhaps the labels and publishers were happy to receive bucket-loads of cash to license their music in return for allowing Nokia to train young folks in the art of always getting music for free!!?

Nokia announced the debut of its pioneering Comes with Music digital entertainment service, which offers consumers a new way to discover and enjoy music. Customers who buy a Comes With Music device will be able to explore and enjoy a diverse catalog of music of international and local artists with unlimited access to millions of tracks for a year, keeping the music once the year is over and revolutionizing their digital music experience.

Dear Nokia, consumers have been discovering and enjoying music for years, for free, via the internets. That’s why music sales are down. It’s nice to see that you are helping to make more free music available to these consumers though.

“Comes With Music sets a precedent for consumer value and convenience that the rest of the digital entertainment industry is already copying,” said Tero Ojanperä, executive vice president and head of the Nokia entertainment and communities business.”

Consumer value and convenience = internet. Otherwise that’s just marketing double-speak.

“Trying out a music recommendation is spontaneous as customers can download without worrying about the cost of an album or a track – the freedom and simplicity of the service is unparalleled.”

See above.

Comes With Music gives you unlimited access to the millions of tracks in the Nokia Music Store and the music is all yours to keep – because it’s not a revolution unless you get to keep your music.

WOW!

“With the launch of Nokia’s Comes With Music, fans now have a new avenue to find and enjoy music from EMI’s catalogue, and our artists have a powerful new way to reach their fans,” said Douglas Merrill, president, digital business, for EMI Music. “By encouraging music discovery in an innovative and consumer-friendly environment, Comes With Music will continue to push experimentation in the digital music industry.”

Experimentation in the digital music industry – fancy that? Only 10 years too late…

The winners here are Nokia [enhanced phone sales] and music lovers [more free music]. The losers are musicians and songwriters [believe me, my royalties on digital sales are miniscule] and the record labels [training kids to get music for free is so 1998...]

The term cyberchondria was coined back in 2000 in reference to people who jump to conclusions about their ailments when seeking out information online.

Microsoft researchers have just announced the results of their study on health-related web searches. People with health issues often use search engines to help them determine what they’re suffering from. Unfortunately, they tend to adopt a worst-case scenario. Eric Horvitz, a researcher at Microsoft says that many folks treat search engines as human experts when looking for answers. He claims that “people tend to look at just the first couple results. If they find ‘brain tumor’ or ‘A.L.S.,’ that’s their launching point.”

Usually, they just scan the first few search results and come away with the conclusion that their condition is much more serious than it really is. Naturally, this can cause anxiousness. With the assumption that they are really sick, subjects escalate their searches to seek out more information about the affliction.

According to the researchers, jumping to the worst case scenario is basic human behavior that has been backed up by decades of research. They hope to change this in the future with the development of search engines that can detect medical-related questions and offer sound advice in return.

Until then, if you’re sick, pay a visit to your doctor instead of a search engine.

Now here’s a very simple and concrete way to save some trees…sign up to stop the unwanted delivery of the Yellow and White pages. Here’s the link, it takes about 30 seconds..

Finally, an advertiser being honest about social media advertising. Ted McConnell general manager-interactive marketing and innovation at Procter & Gamble Co spoke recently at a forum on Digital Media where he came across as rather negative about social network platforms and advertising. He singled out the Facebook platform, saying “I really don’t want to buy any more banner ads on Facebook.”

Other key phrases of his that stand out –
Social networks may never find the ad dollars they’re hunting for because they don’t really have a right to them.
What in heaven’s name made you think you could monetize the real estate in which somebody is breaking up with their girlfriend?
I don’t think everything every consumer says to someone else and writes down is somehow monetizable by the media industry.
Fragmentation thwarts artificial scarcity.
Performance-based advertising will gain share over CPM

Ted McConnell. [Pic Ad Age]

McConnell’s premise is that social network platforms won’t be able to collect ad dollars because they don’t really have a right to them, which I believe is entirely accurate. And his negativity about the platforms appears to hinge on the wrong-headed idea or a misunderstanding of the meaning of the term “social media” – he asked – “Who said this is media? Media is something you can buy and sell. Media contains inventory. Media contains blank spaces. Consumers weren’t trying to generate media. They were trying to talk to somebody. So it just seems a bit arrogant. … We hijack their own conversations, their own thoughts and feelings, and try to monetize it.”

McConnell’s ideas strike a chord with me as I have found myself on the contrarian side of the social media argument recently. I have argued on panels and in essays that technology did not transform the way we socialize –

When we wrongly consider technology as a ‘new’ medium that simply and efficiently transformed culture, business and society, we forget our own human ancestry. We leave out Nature. In our hearts we want to belong, to share; we fear dying alone and as we age we become thanatophobic – we fear dying. Individuality is an illusion. [By that I don't mean an individual's style, taste, fashion etc, things that set us apart aesthetically from others, I mean we are forever bound to being social animals.] Read the rest of these thoughts here.

We need to rethink the term “Social Media.”

Spin The Black Circle

McLuhan and Vinyl? I know – I sometimes stretch an idea to its snapping point but isn’t that why I bother to type all day?

Here goes – As I sit on the panels I’m invited to I often forget to remind myself that at the heart of all my discussions about music and technology the root of it is about my enduring passion for music.

Computer technology, especially web 2.0, has fooled many of us into thinking that we now have a “new” way of communicating. That is simply not true; we forget that Marshall McLuhan pointed out decades ago new technologies simply create new environments – the old environment then becomes the content of the new environment; Facebook simply allows us to digitize our Rolodex. The computer and its keyboard are the medium in this particular message. Our constant need to remain in touch with friends and family endures, and still will well beyond technology.

We should really be considering technology’s effect on the individual and society. Remember, e.e. cummings warned that “progress is a comfortable disease.” So where does music with its myriad genres and forms, its emotions and passionate responses, its common currency, fit into a “technological” culture?

Well consider this – Music is the medium is the message; bear with me here.
If music is the message then in McLuhan’s terms the vinyl record can be described as a technological extension [the medium] of the musicians body. The medium then creates the environment that produces effects [the media.] This then has an effect on society and culture where the starting point is always the individual – that is, you and me. McLuhan also advised against a rigid separation of the physical from the psychological.

If we then consider that the physics of media have changed yet the media that provides the atmospheres has not, and we understand that the effect is still psychological and can not be separated, do McLuhan’s ideas help us unravel the mystery of what innately binds us to the rhythms and lilts of music around the globe? [My argument carries over into live performance too where the instruments are extensions of the players bodies.]

Vinyl racks at Music Millennium Portland

Anyway, on to my thoughts about vinyl.

In a world of 320kb MP3s, FLAC, loss-less this that and the other files, I’m going to take a leap of faith here and hope that many of you jump in too – my premise is that a vinyl record surely has to be the purest embodiment of our universal love for music. It’s the closest thing to experiencing music live that I have heard. When compared to A to B, with A being an analog record and B being a CD, A wins every time for me. I share Neil Young’s comments in the digital vs analog wars – Young has acknowledged the benefit of hiss-free recording that digital technology offers, with the caveat that “along with the hiss went depth of sound and the myriad possibilities of the high end where everything is like the cosmos, exploding stars, echo.” [Read more of this discussion here.]

Digitizing music has made music more affordable and provided ease of use in portability but at the huge expense of having the emotional range, the highs the lows the rumbles, removed in the process. What we have been hearing on CD is a compressed version of a digital slice of the possible range of sound available to our ears. At live shows the bass sub woofers in the PA system allow you to literally ‘feel’ the bottom end, on CD or MP3 that experience is simply not available to you. Yet, when you play a vinyl record through a great hi-fi system you can experience it in a recording.

For some reason I decided at about exactly noon last Saturday to drive over to Music Millennium on Portland’s east side to buy some vinyl. Any vinyl. I came home with three weighty albums – comfortable with their heft and size and glad that I couldn’t just peel them open and stick them in the car’s CD player. [That's rather like the audio equivalent of Slow Food, Slow Music.]

The universe works in mysterious ways. Why is it that when I spend my day riffing on ideas like the ones in this post, drawing them out like an endless piece of string only to have it end up in a tangle of knots, why, why do I find myself buying three vinyl albums for completely different reasons and upon getting home and spinning them find validation for my thinking in the lyrics of a song each on two of them?!!

Nick Cave’s ‘Dig!!! Lazarus Dig!!!’ pressed into oily, rich, satanic black 180 gramme vinyl suggests an artisan at work tattooing a litany of sins and black portents upon the skin of Lazarus himself. In typical N.C. fashion all the lyrics revolve around the push and pull of sex and death yet here the underlying theme is of resurrection and a return to the grave as if the grave is a better place than the world currently is. Quite by coincidence the story of Lazarus provides a fitting metaphor for the resurrection of the vinyl record.

Along with the album comes a free 7″ single with a 7 minute long song pressed over two sides called ‘More News From Nowhere.’ In its epic journey, Cave bangs [pun intended] into woman after woman in a world of no consequence, of ‘news from nowhere,’ as if he’s hearing nothing but white noise from all the multimedia outlets, as if its the end of decency; a Rovian embrace of the end of history, a plague on us all this constant transmission from each of us to millions of others often unknown and without consequence – until its too late.

don’t it make you feel so sad, don’t the blood rush to yr feet
to think that everything you do today
tomorrow is obsolete
technology & women & little children too
don’t it make you feel blue, don’t it make you feel blue
for more news from nowhere, more news from nowhere
don’t it make you feel alone
don’t it make you wanna get right back home
more news from nowhere
more news from nowhere
goodbye/goodbye/goodbye

Wonderfully bleak but kinda makes me reconsider Twitter.

I also picked up ‘Cardinology’ from Ryan Adams and his Cardinals. Although a talented and prolific song writer he isn’t in the same league as Cave. Adams gets to a deep grey but never reaches the dark bloody hues that Cave revels in. [BTW, Cave is an apt surname now I think about it.] ‘Cardinology’ is strong but no game changer like Dig!!! Lazarus Dig!!!.

The song here that caught my attention is ‘Magick’ – where a song is often the total sum of our emotional response to music, wherever we hear it, however we hear it we can’t deny it. In ‘Magick’ Adams suggest it rights all wrongs, overcomes rogue nation states’ sabre rattling, fends off missile attacks and shuts down “power hungry clowns.” He says “give ‘em radios & heels and wake ‘em up with jams.”

I wish I had secret powers, I’d find all the power hungry clowns
and I would shut them down
Give ‘em radios & heels and wake ‘em up with jams on
right after I disappear then disarm, disarm, disarm
and watch the record go round….

In these lyrics the music is on vinyl and the theme is again resurrection – the record keeps on going round. It’s recurring, ‘Magick’ is the power it always brings to challenge popular culture and most importantly, politics. It’s also about addiction.

Pearl Jam visited this space well before Adams with their song ‘Spin The Black Circle’ released on Vitalogy in 1994. This from Wikipedia – According to singer Eddie Vedder, the track is about his and the band’s love for vinyl records. At the band’s July 1, 2003 show in Bristow, Virginia at the Nissan Pavilion, Vedder proclaimed “This song is about old records, old records, anyone remember old records?”

The lyrics play on the similarities between drug addiction and addiction to records and music, as many of the lyrics may be interpreted either way. It is unclear to what extent this is intended to be a serious comparison of different types of addiction and to what extent it is just intended to make the lyrics interesting. Jon Pareles of The New York Times referred to “Spin the Black Circle” as “one of the few songs from Seattle in which a needle has nothing to do with heroin.”

All for the love of vinyl.. Vinyl has a special place in the hearts of a certain demographic – I’d guess those in their late teens and early twenties, definitely those over 40, DJ’s, analog freaks and audio purists. Vinyl brings something to the ear and the heart that MP3s don’t – full-range emotional sonic ra[n]ge…

On a side note it is obvious to many that vinyl has seen a substantial rise in sales over the last few years. Whilst still a small percentage of overall music sales it is carving out its niche amongst music lovers. The labels have embraced this in different ways, mainly through different incentives in the area of giving away MP3 downloads with the vinyl purchase. For the Cave release, Anti allows 3 downloads, presumably as back up should you lose the files, but asks for an email address. Lost Highway offers only 1 download of the Ryan Adams album but doesn’t ask for an email address. Amazingly Warp offers no downloads at all for the Nightmares On Wax album.

Irony of irony’s – after they have fought tooth and nail against the drop in CD sales, music retailers are selling USB record players! Perhaps a better move would be to sell medium to high end turntables. It’s a hardware and software play.

Michael Arrington at TechCrunch posted an interesting and in-depth article last Friday about the state of Facebook’s finances. Facebook currently has 160 million unique visitors a month and as one of those visitors I have often contemplated just how long Facebook can hang in there if the ad model doesn’t pan out. Presumably, 99.9999% of Facebook’s visitors don’t even think about it nor do they care as long as they can have a Vampire bite their friends.

The article is titled ‘Facebook May Be Growing Too Fast. And Hitting The Capital Markets Again.’ It seems that Facebook’s success could be its downfall.

Before we get to Arrington’s numbers here’s a question – If Facebook’s growth and future potential growth is mainly abroad, with the USA shrinking fast to only 20% of the total global user base, what happens to the idea of Social Media and advertising here in the USA? It seems like a Catch-22 situation for Facebook – its revenues are dependent on advertising income but its advertisers will be faced with pitching their products to either a shrinking USA market or to a larger global user base. Geo-targeting might help as long as there is a heavy use of localization in foreign markets. It doesn’t sound promising given how Facebook users are not especially fond of those push ads on their profiles anyway.

And let’s not forget how MTV Europe stumbled at first as it entered the TV/Cable markets in Europe. One language does not fit all they found really quickly – regional accents and dialects were all important and soon there were many versions of MTV Europe in different countries. Meanwhile Facebook members have jumped in to the fray with their own user-created translated versions of the site.

And companies are still playing with fire by jumping into social networks with their brands. Oliver Marks at ZDNet reports on how Virgin Atlantic Airlines had to fire 13 flight attendants who used the Virgin Atlantic Facebook group to malign their customers in unsavory terms. As Marks points out – “Virgin Atlantic (one of my favorite airlines) seem to have fallen into the classic trap of forgetting that FaceBook is a public forum – looking at their online presence there I see a cocktail of different marketing communication focuses, some slightly irritating, and not much in the way of building a relationship with me.”

Here’s some excerpts from Arrington’s article –

Facebook Is Growing, But So Are Costs
There’s no doubt that Facebook is growing at a breathtaking pace. A year ago, according to Comscore, they had just 74 million unique monthly visitors and 35 billion page views. Today those numbers have grown by 118% and 74%, respectively, to 161 million unique visitors and 61 billion page views per month.

It costs a couple of hundred million dollars a year just to keep the lights on at Facebook. But the real problem is keeping up with growth, particularly storage needs. Add another $100 million or more per year for capital expenditures, and you’ve got a company that’s doing exactly the opposite of printing money.

So How ‘Bout Those Revenues?

eMarketer estimates $265 million in revenue for Facebook in 2008. That’s great, right? Well, not really. The company is still losing money – lots of it – at current revenues. And it’s not clear that revenue will grow as robustly as costs.

As we wrote last summer, most of these international users can’t be monetized today. And to make things worse, bandwidth costs in those countries is generally much higher than the U.S. So the users cost more, and they don’t bring in any revenue.

That international growth might be ok if U.S. growth remained strong. But the U.S. market just seems to be tapped at this point, and gaining market share from MySpace is a battle. As we wrote in August, at current growth rates it will take Facebook 18 years to overtake MySpace in the U.S.

[Update 11/11/08]

“I haven’t heard of anyone purchasing something off an ad on Facebook,” says Angie Tulgetske, vice president of RE/MAX Preferred Choice Properties, which resells timeshares and spends thousands of dollars a month on search ads but avoids social-networking sites. “I wouldn’t think any of my marketing dollars would be spent advantageously there.” From Facebook Tries To Woo Marketers

Although the news would be of no surprise to anyone of voting age, according to The Pew Research Center the Internet has become a major source of election news second only to TV. The numbers look something like this – 72%, 33%, 29% for TV, Internet, and newspapers. The TV ranking is skewed though – as David Weinberger, the author and Fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society says on his blog –

“This can be slightly misleading, though. For me — and I am confident that I am 100% typical of people who are like me — the only election news I get directly through TV comes through The Daily Show and Colbert. Otherwise, the ecology of news works like this: Someone posts a bit of news on some site. That snippet may well come from a mainstream source, or it may not. But like a greasy crumb dropped on the sidewalk, it’s instantly swarmed by ants. The ants — that’s you and me, sister — point at it, link to it, explain it, deny it, make fun of it, connect it with something else, and send it or what we’ve made of it around the world. The morsel is gone, digested, appropriated. The ants are the media. The mainstream are only noticed if they’re doing as good a job at being a news ant as the rest of us.”

And as you might expect the cable TV shows garner a highly partisan audience -

Among those who name the Fox News Channel as their main source for campaign news, 52% are Republicans and only 17% are Democrats. By contrast, among those who rely on MSNBC for their campaign news, 50% are Democrats and only 11% are Republicans. Similarly, CNN’s campaign news audience is largely Democratic — 45% are Democrats and 13% are Republicans.

Canon G10 review – New but not improved from Dave Allen on Vimeo.

Now those of you who know us well at Nemo, and particularly StudioNemo, would surely understand that we take our cameras very very seriously indeed… Well, we have lived with and loved the Canon G9 for some time now. In fact we loved its ability to be a basic blogger’s work horse so much that it became standard issue around the shop. So naturally we were waiting with baited breath for the new, shiny updated G10 model…. uh oh… read on and watch the video, it gets ugly.

From Nemo’s Trevor Graves – “This is the review I have been excited to write for months. I have read the rumors on the blogs about Canon discontinuing the G9 and all the new and improved features for the G10. I pre-order the rig on Amazon and sure enough it’s delivered today October 3rd, 2008. With the excitement of a 10 year old I ripped open the box and unleashed the new toy.

That is where the excitement ended.

Being intimately familiar with the G9 I intuitively reached for the Video function of the G10 as I have heard about the new and improved DIGIC 4 chip and the ability of it to produce HD quality video on an SLR. How exciting to have better video!! Wait, what’s this, small video format and NO TIME LAPSE feature. WTF??? I pay $50 more and Canon drops features that turned me on to the G9 in the first place. WTF!!! I am pissed! Who was the genius at Canon that is living in a bat cave to lose sight of what makes the G9 wonderful in this new world of bloggin! Was the decision maker a frustrated SLR engineer that wanted to get their rocks off on a 14.7 megapixel CCD sensor? Why even have the G10 at all. Other point and shoots are smaller and have a large enough meg for decent prints, the larger SLR have better quality and better everything so why go with this G10 product that has nothing more to offer than less noisy images in low light and a faster processing speed that is negligible to the end user any way. WTF??? The over under dial is handy and more convenient but come on guys, I can tweak that exposure on the back end in photoshop and the G9 over/under function wasn’t that horrible. Shit even the lens cover looks cheaper than the original G9 lens cover. I bet this one scratches the lens in its poor construction too. WTF? You could have at least made that better for $50.”

Well, Canon, seems like there’s some ’splaining to do….

I read an interesting story in the NYT today – Mourning Old Media’s Decline. It wasn’t a feelgood piece:

“It’s been an especially rotten few days for people who type on deadline. On Tuesday, The Christian Science Monitor announced that, after a century, it would cease publishing a weekday paper. Time Inc., the Olympian home of Time magazine, Fortune, People and Sports Illustrated, announced that it was cutting 600 jobs and reorganizing its staff. And Gannett, the largest newspaper publisher in the country, compounded the grimness by announcing it was laying off 10 percent of its work force — up to 3,000 people. Clearly, the sky is falling. The question now is how many people will be left to cover it.” [BTW, Time Inc may have a hard time in a digital age - it didn't mention its own story on its own web site...]

That’s an important question. Where do we go to get our news? For me it’s the New York Times homepage every day. And if the paper fails because online advertising fails to keep up with the decline in paid subscriptions who will report the news? Really, think about it – all the technology in the world will not bring us up-to-the-minute breaking news if no one is reporting it.

The “cesspool of useless information” line in this post’s header is not a lament from an old school journalist either, it’s from Eric Schmidt, the chief executive of Google.

This must be one of the better exit letters I have read. Completely transparent and open without any finger-pointing or playing of the blame game. Everyone in business today should take note of how gracious being radically transparent can actually be. Leather Storrs took the high road and should take a bow. Many people in business and politics today can learn a lot from this simple statement.
[Found on PortlandFoodandDrink.com]

“Rocket will close Saturday, November 8th. Economic pressure and critical dissatisfaction combine to make continuing on our current course impossible. We are, however, resolved to keep our beautiful space and our magical garden for as long as we can. To that end, we intend to become a private venue. We hope that you will consider Rocket for your functions: holiday parties, birthdays, receptions, hip-hop throw downs, pinochle tournaments and any other events you can imagine. We will also sponsor several events of our own: wine dinners, thematic menus and roof produce driven dinners. Despite the current national vogue of finger pointing, I’m afraid the responsibility for our failure lies squarely with me. In an attempt to wow and titillate I forgot the fundamentals of a pleasant dining experience: thoughtful, delicious food served expertly. In a fever for molecular gastronomy and cute, clever combinations, I alienated customers and critics. Bring on the humble pie.

This is not a tragedy. Employees will be paid, debts will be honored and there will be no absconding with cash. There are no investors left holding an empty bag. The ripples of our closure are contained.

We would like to extend an invitation to you to join us one last time in the coming weeks. We will host a tequila dinner on November 5th . That will be fun. Other than that we will continue our dinner service, Tuesday through Saturday, from five until whenever. There is still plenty of produce to pick and liquor to drink. We’d love to see you in Rocket and we hope you’ll keep us in mind in the future. Please forward this message to anyone who might find it helpful and remember to subscribe to our newsletter.

Sincerely,

Leather Storrs”

Pepsi has just announced a massive undertaking that involves relaunching all of their branding and packaging. The new imagery is supposed to hit the market by early 2009. The most noticeable change is the iconic ‘Pepsi Globe’ logo which is now supposed to represent a smile.

Major fail? I think so. Come on Pepsi, you can do better than this. Pepsi should have hired Turner Duckworth to update their brand, who recently did an amazing job stripping down Coke to pure class.

Individual innovation and creativity in our society are the cornerstones of our economy. They create wealth and improve the nation’s welfare. Through innovations, the 20th century became the American Century. Will the 21st century be so as well or will it become the Global Century? How, if at all, would your administration foster innovation in the following areas: the provision of health care for our citizens; an immigration policy that attracts and retains the best; educational policies that increase the value of our human capital, our most important resource; helping people accumulate enough retirement savings; international trade and manufacturing; the evolution of information technology, biotechnology, nanotechnology and neuroscience; the allocation of water, food and energy and the development of alternative energy sources; and, to some, the most important, the environment?

— MYRON S. SCHOLES, who shared the Nobel prize in economics in 1997

More questions here.

Daniel Day-Lewis as Daniel Plainview in the movie ‘There Will Be Blood.’

Much is being made in the current election cycle of which presidential candidate will bring about change. The Vice Presidential Debate twisted and turned on which party’s presidential candidate was more of an agent of change than the others. ‘Maverick’ was a word that I heard a lot during the VP debate and it only came from the lips of Governor Sarah Palin when describing herself, Senator John McCain and their team. It suggests McCain and Palin will act with single-handed impulsiveness more than checking their guts. The Obama camp meanwhile sticks to its message of change and hope, something that sounds more inclusive.

It had me thinking that maverick is a word for describing an agent of change; after all it’s not a word we use often in common currency. But no, a maverick is defined as someone who is not inclined to conform to accepted rules or standards. It has its western connotation too – an unbranded range animal, especially a motherless calf.

De Niro as Travis Bickle

Stepping outside of politics and into the world of movies, maverick brought to mind three brilliant actors in perfect screen roles. Robert De Niro in ‘Taxi Driver,’ Paul Newman in ‘Cool Hand Luke‘ and Daniel Day-Lewis in ‘There Will Be Blood.’ Not that maverick is a word that describes the actors although arguably it could. The men they play in each of their roles are most definitely mavericks and notably the characters in these movies are all loners, they manage very well without help from others; there is no team spirit here.

As I looked up these movies online I came across a review of Cool Hand Luke that was prefaced with this paragraph:

“For the secret of man’s being is not only to live but to have something to live for. Without a stable conception of the object of life, man would not consent to go on living, and would rather destroy himself than remain on earth, though he had bread in abundance.”- Fyodor Dostoyevsky.

It seems to sum up Luke in the movie quite well – the authorities attempt to control Luke’s every movement and unsurprisingly Luke fights back regardless of the consequences that befall him. The review goes on – “Luke is sent to prison, and what follows is one of the greatest existential movies of all time. His conversations with God, the nature of his offense, his isolation and alienation, his experiences and a pair of profound scenes, both involving his mother, elevate “Cool Hand Luke” above most prison-break movies.” A portrayal of a true Maverick.

Meanwhile in ‘Taxi Driver,’ De Niro’s Travis Bickle, tortured by what he sees as a night shift cab driver, becomes a one man nihilistic machine dedicated to cleaning up the streets of New York, as he says “Someday a real rain will come and wash all the scum off the streets.” In ‘There Will Be Blood‘ Day-Lewis’s character, Daniel Plainview “is a charismatic and ruthless oil prospector, driven to succeed by his intense hatred of others and psychological need to see any and all competitors fail.” Real Mavericks.

In Hollywood this maverick stuff makes for gripping plot lines and thrilling movies but it should stay right there on the movie lot. A Maverick or two in the White House is a whole different storyline and that script should be relegated to B movie status.

I have a friend who is studying journalism at a decent university. Before she started the course and took on the financial burden it would entail she had asked me for my opinion about the value of having a journalism degree versus just diving in and finding a job as a writer. Tricky question.

Here we are in 2008 where ‘citizen journalists‘ abound and they are here to stay as Wikipedia shows. Although getting a good degree is a worthwhile endeavor my gut tells me that my friend should be writing; every day, everywhere. A degree in journalism may no longer be the prerequisite to being gainfully employed.

As more businesses begin to embrace radical transparency (as they should) then new job positions are opening up that do not follow the old tried [tired?] and tested methods of ‘corporate communications.’ In the new world of PR/Communications I suggest that the following list of abilities/talents would be a very large part of the job description. See how you score:

01. Do you have a personal blog or website? [ Yes? - good. 10 points. No? - start one.]
02. Are you an influencer? [Do your peers look to you for advice and insight into how people are snapping up the latest gadgets and are immersing themselves in music, fashion and technology? Do they ask you what your opinion is before they make a decision themselves?] 10 points.
03. Are you a trusted source? [Do people trust your opinions on subjects in your area of expertize? For instance, if you are a devout environmentalist do you think the Toyota Prius is a boon or a bust? Explain.] 10 points.
04. Are you a thought leader? [Do you contribute articles and essays that outline your thinking on subjects that you are well versed in? Do people care?] 10 points.
05. Are you a filter? [Do you carefully distill content, media and messages into relevant posts for your readers?] 10 points.
06. You are, of course, well versed in the art of Google Alerts, right?
[No? deduct 10 points.]
07. You use Twitter, FaceBook, Tumblr, FriendFeed, Flickr, MyVidoop, LinkedIn, Twellow, Ma.gnolia and faithfully follow Daily Candy, BuzzNet, Idolater and Perez Hilton. [Good. Award yourself any number of points.]
08. You understand that a Combine Harvester is not a competitor to Yahoo! Pipes?
09. You understand the function of memes in the cultural sociosphere? [If you can understand the relationship between Richard Dawkins, his writings on natural selection, Darwin and John Gray's thoughts on The Human Animal, award yourself untold amounts of points.]
10. Finally. You understand that there is no reason whatsoever for a company to have a FaceBook Page, yes? [Good.]

Ok, so my points system is lame but hey, if you scored more than 50 points you can now apply for any position that includes the following in the job description – Social Media, PR 2.0, Web Content Editor, Blogger, Web 2.0 Communications Director, Online Evangelist, New Media Communications Director, Online Guru…etc, etc, etc…Or you could follow your heart and get that journalism degree.

Click the image and watch the action…

In today’s Brave New World, beware of those amongst the social media chattering classes advising companies and brands who throw around phrases such as “you need a Facebook page” or better yet, buzz words like viral as in “you should make a viral video,” perhaps even “are you Twitting.” Facebook is getting called out as the place for narcissists [who would ever have thought...!] meanwhile pundits are trying to get their heads around The Naked Generation [Hint: they lay their lives bare online and understand that Britney flies close to flameout but dig the fact that she's a fascinating spectacle all the same.]

I’m not certain if Nintendo has a Facebook page for its game, Wario Land but if you want an example of an online marketing campaign that is simple, effective and fun then this YouTube video is for you.

Pic from HuffingtonPost.com

I have been an enthusiastic user of Amazon’s MP3 Store ever since it launched. The store challenges the hegemony of the Apple iTunes Store which is the front runner because of savvy marketing and the superior hardware that is the iPod, but there is no reason that music lovers shouldn’t be able to gather up music from other sources whilst reaping the benefits of DRM-free MP3s; people need to be educated about Digital Rights Management or DRM and obviously it isn’t in Apple’s interest to do that. *See footnotes for explanation about DRM.

Here’s the rub – MP3s purchased from Apple’s iTunes store can only be played on an iPod or a computer authorized by the user to play those MP3s, they can not be transferred to other devices. *See footnotes on how to work around Apple’s DRM. Locking down the music to Apple devices is the technological equivalent of the buggy whip manufacturers back in the day, getting laws passed to ensure that anyone driving a Model T Ford had to have someone walk in front of the car to warn pedestrians of its approach….

Steve Jobs has long maintained that the decision to go with DRM in the first place was because the major record labels demanded that their music files be protected. Critics have long pointed out that it is in Apple’s interest to use DRM to lock the music to the iPod as all of Apple’s profits are in the hardware not the content. And now that Amazon has opened its MP3 download store offering major label music at twice the file size, 256kbs to Apple’s 128kbs, and at prices cheaper than iTunes, Jobs’ argument is beginning to wear thin. *See footnotes for an explanation of MP3 file sizes.

And now comes the G1 Android-based phone, every one of which includes Amazon.com’s DRM-free MP3 store pre-loaded. The G1 users may have never understood the benefits of DRM-free songs and they may never have heard of Amazon’s MP3 store, yet it is not a stretch to imagine that once they use the Amazon service on the phone and realize they can move their music downloads freely and easily across all MP3-playing devices it will make them look askance at the iTunes store.

The Amazon MP3 Store works seamlessly with the iTunes application too so there’s no worry of having to use another application to play MP3s. Upon download of MP3s from Amazon its downloader populates the songs into your iTunes folder, it’s that simple. After that if you own a Zune or an iRiver you can simply sync the device up and the MP3s will appear just as they do on an iPod – you no longer need an iPod to play MP3s unless you have purchased MP3s from iTunes with DRM… Once public awareness spreads of the benefits of DRM-Free files, [no doubt by word of mouth as it is not a media-driven story,] iTunes may have to think again about using DRM.

* About DRM

DRM is short for Digital Rights Management. From Wikipedia – Digital rights management (DRM) is a generic term that refers to access control technologies used by hardware manufacturers, publishers and copyright holders to limit usage of digital media or devices. The term is used to describe any technology which makes the unauthorized use of media or devices technically formidable, and generally doesn’t include other forms of copy protection which can be circumvented without modifying the media or device, such as serial numbers or keyfiles. It can also refer to restrictions associated with specific instances of digital works or devices. Digital rights management has been and is being used by content provider companies such as Sony, Apple Inc., Microsoft and the BBC.

* How to remove the DRM from an iTunes purchased MP3:

Simply create a new playlist in your iTunes application. Drag the purchased album or any individual purchased tracks to the playlist. Click ‘Burn CD’ and insert a blank CD-R. After burning the CD click ‘Import CD’ after ensuring that you have set the preferences for importing to ‘MP3.’ The newly imported songs from the CD are now all DRM-Free MP3s. After successfully importing from the CD you can either delete the original MP3s with DRM or keep them for back up.

* An explanation of MP3 file sizes.

In the iTunes applications preferences click on ‘General’ then ‘Import Settings.’ Select ‘MP3 Encoder’ then click on ‘Setting’ below. You now have a choice of file size settings. Apple tags the settings Good Quality – 128kbs, High Quality – 160 kbs and Higher Quality – 192 kbs where the number of kbs refers to the kilobit size of the MP3 file. The higher the number the better quality of the MP3 file for playback. You can also select a custom setting to go higher still. Some people argue that 320kbs is near-CD quality for instance. Apple’s iTunes Store offers downloads at 128kbs while Amazon’s MP3 Store offers files at 256kbs, twice the size in other words.

I wrote on this blog back in March about the success of plastic and paper bag elimination in Ireland. The government there made it a priority to reduce the use of these bags and worked with business to make it happen. Here’s my blog post on the subject.

The campaign was incredibly successful even though it meant adding a tax penalty to both shoppers and grocery store owners to make it work. It has now become as socially unacceptable to be seen using plastic grocery bags in Ireland as it would be to be caught smoking in a maternity ward. It is not hard to switch peoples social behaviour when it is seen to be for a social good. It was made clear to the Irish that the amount of energy that went into manufacturing plastic bags, that were all destined to end up in landfills anyway, was not sustainable. Paper bags were not the answer either as they are just as wasteful of natural resources as their plastic counterpart. reusable shopping bags were the answer and the Irish bought that argument.

The Irish now pack reusable bags in their cars and offices and carry them with them on buses when they go shopping. It’s simple and effective and it is a small step toward energy independence. Portland can do it.

Brent Terrazas thinks so – “This is disturbing – Don’t say I didn’t warn you. It’s a recent commercial for Domino’s Pizza that features a rapping “Pasta Dude” who gets knocked down by ‘the man’ (or rather, ‘the mom’). It seems like they were going over the top in an effort to be funny, however this is one of the worst commercials I can remember watching in a LOOOOOONG time.”

Oh well….at least it’s being discussed.

Mark Drapeau posted an interesting article on Mashable about new media and how it could help the cable and network TV companies retain their advertising dollars.

In an age of DVR’s such as Tivo, thousands of viewers are time-shifting their viewing so as more and more cable and TV news shows ask viewers to “Twitter your comments” and interact with the hosts those time-shifting miss out on that opportunity. Yet as Drapeau points out – The financial consequence of [viewers] not using DVRs, or downloading the shows from a third-party website, or other new options, is that more people watching the real-time version means more viewer share, which in turn means more advertising revenue.

Will more people start tuning in to watch in real time? With the political race heating up we might just see a switch to traditional TV viewing for a while.

Chasing the story, chasing the numbers. This presidential campaign season is a tricky time for the TV networks. It seems that the network evening newscasts and network news divisions are struggling to pin down any hard stories. The media pundits are flailing around as the Democratic Convention didn’t go the way they had predicted, [Clinton this, Clinton that, disaffected feminists revolt etc,] and now with Hurricane Gustav hitting the Gulf Coast the Republican Convention has been downsized and all the top journalists and commentators have decamped to the storm zone.

It’s very telling, and yet still amazing, that here we are in 2008 with the networks covering the presidential race while looking longingly over their shoulders at the 2000 race, a time when YouTube had yet to make its mark. They have not been paying attention. The networks are still looking for ratings and are judging their results based on the number of viewers they attract. Yet, as Frank Rich writes in his op-ed article on Sunday, Andrew Rasiej, the founder of Personal Democracy Forum, which monitors the intersection of politics and technology, points out that when networks judge their success by who got the biggest share of the television audience, “they are still counting horses while the world has moved on to counting locomotives.” [Rasej also runs TechPresident, a group blog that covers how the 2008 presidential candidates are using the web.] The Web, in its infinite iterations, is eroding all 20th-century media.

On cable, CNN consistently beat ABC, NBC and CBS in the ratings last week according to Nielsen, but as media are being transformed cable news channels may not last much longer either.

it was laughable seeing the networks fall over themselves as they struggled to understand how Obama got to the nomination. Obama’s supporters didn’t have that problem. As Rich says “the Obama campaign has long been on board those digital locomotives.” The Obama campaign has been telling its story online well beneath the radar of the mainstream media. When the networks focused on how many people turned up at Invesco Field to watch and listen to Obama they were counting horses. Meanwhile the real story lies in how many people are following the candidate’s every move online. Obama’s fund-raising and organizational networking online is unknown. That might give the networks another big surprise come November.

And then another fast-moving story breaks. As Hurricane Gustav moves over land and dies down the networks can switch their attention to the Republican VP nominee, Sarah Palin, whose 17 year old daughter is pregnant. That’s one that will have them horse counting.

The New York Times announced that Senator McCain has picked a running mate – Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska.

In a surprise move, Senator John McCain announced here Friday that he had chosen Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska as his running mate, shaking up the political world at a time when his campaign has been trying to attract women, especially disaffected supporters of Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton.

On the surface this seems like a great opportunity to celebrate equality – the first woman chosen by the Republican party to be on the VP ticket. Give McCain’s choice some thought though and you soon realize that this not about helping women ascend to higher office, this is just politics as usual. Gov. Palin is just a pawn in the game and the game is to attempt to attract disaffected female Democrats to the McCain ticket. Gov. Palin brings no experience to the ticket whatsoever, and at his age you would have expected McCain would have picked someone with a great deal of experience should she have to take over the Oval Office.

McCain’s advisors clearly think that in this campaign women voters will presumably flock to the McCain – Palin ticket just because she’s a woman. So, women of America, congratulations you are now thought of as a demographic group to be wooed for votes. No experience necessary. If I were female I would find this all very demeaning. Women deserve more in this election. Both camps should be very aware of their voting power.

Click image to play ‘Because of’

I found a YouTube video of a song from one of America’s greatest living song writers, a video of a song in which he delivers an ode to passion, old age and inevitable decline. A look back at what was, has been and perhaps now will no longer be.

In this recent song, ‘Because of,’ Leonard Cohen revisits his youth, a time of prodigous output when he wrote great songs such as Suzanne and Famous Blue Raincoat and one of my favourites, Chelsea Hotel #2 in which Cohen captures the freewheeling essence of Manhattan in the 60’s – “I remember you well in the Chelsea Hotel, you were talking so brave and so sweet, giving me head on the unmade bed, while the limousines wait in the street. Those were the reasons and that was New York, we were running for the money and the flesh.” There were always women surrounding Cohen and the threads of those relationships wove their way into his songs. As his Wikipedia entry says his work often deals with the exploration of religion, isolation and sexuality.

The POV of the video for ‘Because of’ is via a porthole, or perhaps a lens intended to focus on the subject matter – women dancing half-naked on a bed. And Cohen, in that famous gravelly voice, intones rather than sings the lyrics of his lament.

“Because of a few songs wherein I spoke of their mystery, women have been exceptionally kind……and they say, “look at me Leonard, look at me one last time…”

The song brings to mind another talented artist in Cohen’s peer group, the writer and novelist Philip Roth; they were born within a year of each other, Roth in 1933 and Cohen in 1934. In 2007 Roth delivered Exit Ghost, a novel of immense power, in which the novel’s central character Zuckerman struggles with his past [there are references to The Ghost Writer a previous Roth novel] and his incontinence and impotence due to an operation to combat his prostate cancer. Roth/Zuckerman sums up his helplessness when he writes “I gave up swimming regularly down at the college pool for the bulk of the year (with bloomers under my (swim) suit) and continued to confine myself to sporadically yellowing the waters of my own pond during the Berkshires’ few months of warm weather, when, rain or shine, I do my laps for half an hour everyday.”

The difference in these end game soliloquies from each man’s perspective is that Cohen seems more hopeful, as if there is more beyond the life he now lives, yet Zuckerman/Roth sees only despair, decline and finality. Clearly, even to the end, true passion not only consumes us but also never dies.

“>

The Communication Arts web site gave the Nemo-branded Nike 6.0 site a thumbs up this week with a ‘Web Site of The Day’ pick – Nike 6.0 blurs the line between the audience and the company by creating clear communication, information and a way to engage with the brand. It’s always nice feelin’ the love.

Babara Kiviat, a blogger for Time Mag’s The Curious Capitalist blog, has discovered two new things – Threadless and crowdsourcing. In a post yesterday entitled crowdsourcing worked on me she marveled at how Threadless works – it’s a user-driven business and its products are voted upon and ranked by its customers and/or site visitors. It is a highly successful and profitable business. Good job digging this up Barbara, Threadless has only been around since 2000. More details can be found at Skinny Corp the company that owns Threadless.

Meanwhile crowdsourcing is a term that was first coined by Jeff Howe in a June 2006 Wired magazine article and has been open to debate ever since. It’s worth reading the Wikipedia page about crowdsourcing where you will discover that Douglas Rushkoff and Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales both have serious doubts about the term and its implications.

Nice to see Time keeping its finger on the popular culture pulse though.

Earlier this year, Portland enhanced its bike-friendly status by becoming the first US city to be designated a Platinum-level Bicycle Friendly Community. In 2006, then Commissioner now Mayor-elect, Sam Adams had launched a nine-part strategy to win that status and called together advocates and community leaders to work toward achieving the goal. Mission accomplished as they say.

There is a problem though. In Portland and across the nation as more people are affected by the high price of gas and switch to the bicycle for their commute tensions are rising between car drivers and cyclists. Along comes a timely new book – ‘Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do’ by Tom Vanderbilt which has been reviewed by Mary Roach, who admits to a map-reading-while -driving induced fender bender in Portland a few years ago. Reading this book may help understand the psyche of the person behind the wheel – human nature is at fault.

For anyone interested in the way traffic flows and why you find yourself sitting in many traffic jams this book seems to be a good read. What follows are bullet points that I’ve pulled from Roach’s review:

01. Traffic jams are not caused by flaws in road design but by flaws in human nature.
02. Gawkers cause a 12.7% increase in traffic slowdown after a crash and the rubberneckers themselves are so busy gawking that they often slam into the car in front of them as it brakes for the driver to get a better look.
03. Drivers will slow down to look at anything, even a couch dumped in a roadside ditch.
04. Starbucks places stores with drive-through lanes on opposite sides of the road to spare drivers the “agony of having to make a left turn during rush hour.”
05. In a 15 block area around UCLA drivers logged on an average day 3600 miles looking for a place to park.
06. Add a new highway and drivers will defect from others to clog it up.
07. Americans won’t accept congestion charging to help reduce traffic.
08. They will accept a surcharge for peak-travel time hotel rooms and airfares though.
09. We think we are good drivers and that’s a problem as we base that on the number of accidents we’ve been in instead of on the number of accidents we narrowly avoid.
10. In ancient Rome, Caesar declared a daytime ban on chariots and carts as traffic was so bad!

And how does this affect bicyclists? Well, Vanderbilt’s research has discovered that drivers pass bicyclists more closely on a road with bike lanes than on one without. And pedestrians can’t win either – more people are killed while crossing in crosswalks than while jaywalking.

The solution appears to be that we should separate cars, bicyclists and pedestrians and also implement a congestion charge on drivers to reduce the amount of cars in cities. Portland seems to be the best candidate for this experiment. Go Sam.

Is it art? Is it life? Is it jeans? Advertising Agency FFL Paris, France and its Executive Creative Directors Fred & Farid have decide to take the “high art” road to advertising Wrangler Jeans. This means we can have arty photos that reek of misogyny – half-naked women who’ve apparently been murdered and thrown into lakes and rivers. Judging by all the negative remarks over at Ads Of The World’s web site the campaign isn’t going over so well.

Now why couldn’t those Georgian guys have captured a live one? They say they saw three more after all.

Here we go, Mark our Creative Director asks me – Which brand do you think is responsible for the hoax? And, will it bring more anger and thunder down on that brand for pulling off the prank in the first place? I turn it over to you wise social media pundits. Will this end in tears? Let’s hope the brand involved isn’t catering to anyone below 40 years old as the first Bigfoot hoax was perpetrated in 1958.

Here’s a few words from the lucky guy who found the gnarly specimen – “I’m not asking anyone to believe us,” Mr. Dyer said. “I’m just asking them to sit and watch, because you’re going to eat your words.”

Along with the New York Times I’ll be waiting with interest for the news conference tomorrow out of Palo Alto, CA, for what has been affectionally named Blobsquatch. Meanwhile, it’s back to working on the Yeti-found-snowboarding-on-Everest campaign….

Nemo’s Creative Director Mark Lewman and me were riffing on his idea of how a company’s work and overall business can be validated in an era of Google, YouTube, Wikipedia and radical transparency et al. The bottom line that we seemed to arrive at is that it is not good enough to deliver good work these days – anyone can do good work. The task at hand is to be trusted to create amazing work and then, when your amazing work is discovered, fame will surely follow.

Here’s Mark’s distilled thoughts so far:
Success in the 21st century means finding balance between two timeless elements Trust and Fame. Your work is who you are. This is the part of the equation you control. To stand out today, everything you do must be awesome. When people encounter what you produce they must find substance and excellence. Just because an idea can be relied upon as great doesn’t mean it automatically wins. It isn’t complete until it has believers; distribution and exposure make an idea stronger and add value through cultural validation. As trust and reliability grows so should the fame.

Jeff Jarvis provides an extension of these thoughts when he writes on Buzzmachine – “All content must be transparent: open on the web with permanent links so it can receive links. It’s not content until it’s linked.”

And then, looking beyond transparency at the barriers to creative expression and its dissemination, it is worth remembering this point that Jarvis recounts elsewhere in ‘The Myth of the Creative Class‘ after he has reconsidered his views on copyright law and realizes that a too stringent application of copyright infringement can stifle the spread of what has been created – “when creations are restricted it is the creator who suffers more because his creation won’t find its full and true public, its spark finds no kindling, and the fire dies. The creative class, copyright, mass media, and curmudgeonly critics stop what should be a continuing process of creation; like reverse alchemists, they turn abundance into scarcity, gold into lead.”

Happy Prescriptions “Thought it’d lead us..”

Getting it right, getting exposed. A comment on the Girl Talk post, left by a user named ‘Natron’ led me to a web site for Happy Prescriptions, no doubt the web site for said ‘Natron’ who it turns out is a Portland musician. Another click of a hand [you have to visit the site to get that] led me to Happy Prescriptions MySpace where I found the video above. There’s also a free MP3 ep there. Circle complete.

As President Bush and his wife were attending the opening ceremonies of the Olympic Games and American diplomats in Europe were asleep at the wheel, Russia decided to use the cover of the massive Olympics hooplah to attack Georgia in an attempt to reclaim the pro-Russian breakaway territories of South Ossetia and Abkhasia.

During the Cold War the glory of bringing home gold medals from the Olympic Games was paramount for powerful nations. Russia was dominant for many years in track and field events and swimming winning many gold medals often leaving America, its nemesis, to pick up the silver. The machine that turned out Russia’s Olympic athletes was well oiled and treated lavishly. Its superiority at the Games showed how powerful a nation it had become.

Fast forward to the 21st century and much has now changed. After the collapse of the Berlin Wall Russia went through many years of economic upheaval and leadership arriving today under the firm grip of Vladimir Putin the ‘former’ President and now Prime Minister of the country. It has become an economic powerhouse once again and it is Mr Putin who is handling all of the media statements around this invasion.

Why now is Mr Putin appearing confident and bullish over these attacks? Perhaps it is no coincidence that he used the distraction of the Olympics to launch his attacks on Georgia. Maybe too he has been studying popular culture in both the East and the West? Young people today are less enamored by award shows. The dishing out of Oscars by actors and actresses to their counterparts and seeing Jay-Z receive a Grammy from his musical partner Rhianna has lost its lustre. Even American Idol is slipping – one producer has smelled the coffee and jumped ship.

For the participating nations the Olympics provides the most spectacular and the most televised awards-giving of all but when a stalwart newspaper, The Guardian, has to ask its readers “Will you be watching the Olympics?” and Jacques Rogge, president of the International Olympics Committee warns that the Olympics need to be made more relevant to the younger generation as less young people are showing interest, then something’s up.

Like those young people Mr Putin could care less about the Olympics. He understands that America’s economic might is in decline and no amount of gold medals in Beijing will repair the image of a country on its heels simultaneously fighting two foreign wars and struggling with a recession at home. Russia is focusing on amassing the very products that the West is short of – oil and natural gas – and the pipelines that deliver those products to the shipping terminals run through or nearby the territories that his troops are now fighting to reclaim.

Mr Putin will gladly swap gold medals for energy dominance any day – China, India and Europe want what he has – the biggest prize of all and Russia wants to take home the gold.

Girl Talk live in Detroit. Photo – Christos/Detroitartist.org

Gregg Gillis is more well known as the musician Girl Talk. And he believes very strongly that he is a musician and not, as many people have called him, a DJ. If you haven’t heard his work you might wonder why there would be any issue for Gillis but upon hearing his craftily designed songs you will notice that each track is made up of many short snippets of samples of songs that you know you’ve heard somewhere else. On his recent album, Feed The Animals, that he released online Radiohead-style on Illegal Art he told the New York Times that it includes more than 300 samples and that he estimates that each minute of “Feed the Animals” took him about a day to create. That’s a lot of days.

More importantly though his preferred method of “song writing,” i.e. using riffs borrowed from other people’s work puts him front and centre in the debate over copyright law and fair use. His stance is that he is using such tiny samples of other people’s work that he argues his actions are protected under fair use. Not all legal experts agree but so far he has avoided the threat of litigation.

As a musician [I am a founding member of the UK post-punk band, Gang of Four] with my own copyrights I share his stance as I believe that copyright laws have become far too stringent and are now limiting artists’ abilities to be creative. Many people would like to see the law relaxed in certain areas to allow more creativity to spring forth. One area that definitely falls under the term known as gray is the practice of creating mashups. A Mashup in the musical form is exactly what Gillis is doing, literally intermingling or layering beats and samples from various songs on top of and into each other. The end result is surely a completely new work. As Wikipedia puts it – a mashup is a digital media file containing any or all of text, graphics, audio, video, and animation, which recombines and modifies existing digital works to create a derivative work.

Any digital media is open to the process of mashing, and just like a collage, where found images are most commonly rendered onto a canvas, the end result of this creative process should be considered a new original work. There should be no threat of litigation for artists such as Gregg Gillis who create these new works of musical digital art. Go here to hear Gillis in action as Girl Talk and see how many songs you recognize.

In that spirit I post here a mashup that I recently created in collaboration with the musician Jon Ragel who goes by the moniker Boy Eats Drum Machine. Rather than sampling we decided to actually perform the mashup by playing live in the studio on top of sampled drums. The song borrows parts from the artists Talking Heads, Aaliyah, Van Halen and The Cure.

BEDM feat. Dave Allen – Talking Heads/Aaliyah/Van Halen/Cure Mashup [MP3] Click to play, right click to download.

Riding the wave of consumer interest and awareness of healthy and organic foods Whole Foods, the up-market grocery chain, rapidly spread into middle and upper class neighborhoods around the country. Consumers with plenty of discretionary income to spend flocked to its stores and it soon earned itself the sobriquet Whole Paycheck, a phrase the companies executives would like to now remove from common parlance.

With the economy in the dumpster people are now reigning in on discretionary spending and to make matters worse for Whole Foods, consumer interest in organic food appears to be leveling off after several years of double-digit growth, according to the Hartman Group, a market research firm specializing in health and wellness. [Found on NYT]

With Whole Foods stock off 70% since 2006 is this a company that has stumbled like another former leader in the discretionary spending market, Starbucks? The cost of fuel and the high rise in food prices are definitely hurting the consumers pocketbook now they are turning their backs on high-priced grocery chains like Whole Foods.

This is not to say that consumers who are heavily committed to organic foods and are happy to pay a premium for them will stop buying organic. More likely it’s those customers who were attracted to the “idea” of organic, pulled in by savvy marketing from companies who never used the term organic to describe their produce, who will steer away from high-priced organic foods and go back to regular produce at cheaper grocery chains. As everyone jumped on the organic band wagon sales soared but now it is consumers economic woes that are dictating where their groceries monies will be spent. The trend appears to be that meat, produce and dairy that is organic continues to sell but products such as breakfast bars or cereals and other similar food categories labeled organic are now less important to shoppers.

Whole Foods problems do appear to mirror those of Starbucks‘ – they were both once Wall Street darlings whose stocks soared for years, but with aggressive strategies for expansion by building more stores rapidly both chains were unable to maintain their margins and Wall Street punished them. They also relied heavily on customers paying a premium for what they saw as a premium product and that only works in times of prosperity not in an economic downturn.

There is also the hyper-local aspect of consumer habits these days. Farmers Markets and even cooperative shares in small organic farms are becoming very popular these days. These markets and farms offer consumers access to locally grown organic produce at the right price and also the feelgood aspect of supporting their local communities. Think local, eat local may be a phrase that becomes popular but it won’t help a national chain like Whole Foods. Whole Paycheck may very well haunt them and their shareholders.

Related Post: Starbucks Fires Head of Entertainment Division

It seems that the powers that be at Facebook and their archenemies over at the record labels need to hurry up and reach agreement on what is Fair Use when it comes to posting videos online. I received yet another lovely notice from Facebook today about “possible infringement” not “actual” but “possible.” Read on -

Notification of Alleged Copyright Infringement
We have removed your video entitled “Cut Copy, party at Dave’s, Nemo puts up the posters” uploaded at 2:23pm April 29th, 2008. We did this because we learned that your video might include copyrighted material owned by a third party, such as a video clip or background audio. If you are the copyright owner, or have permission from the rights holder to upload and distribute this material on Facebook, you may file a counter notice of alleged infringement by following the link below.

The Facebook Team
copyright@facebook.com

So lets refer to the video from the Electronic Frontier Foundation that spells out our rights under the DMCA rules.

Here’s the story behind the video that was taken down. The Australian band, Cut Copy, and their manager Neil are friends of mine. I invited the band to dinner at my house in Portland prior to their show in town. We had a good time, we shot video, I edited it and posted it. Seemed harmless enough but clearly not. I have filed a counter claim with Facebook so we’ll see how that goes. And someone should let Universal Music know that I fed Cut Copy dinner that night too….I’ll send Universal a bill… Watch another video from the same night here.

Related Post: How YouTube Could Make Some Money with Viacom

Launched in 2005, Blog Her is an online community for women who blog. In addition, it holds the world’s largest conferences for bloggers (men are also welcome to attend).

Last weekend, BlogHer held its yearly conference in San Francisco and featured workshops on building web traffic, using open source software and dealing with the emotional issues related to blogging. The signs that this was a woman-centric event were everywhere; men’s bathrooms had been converted to women’s, there was a lactation room and child care available and onesies imprinted with blogging slogans were for sale.

For a relatively new conference, BlogHer is in high demand. According to the NYTimes.com, though men and women are creating blogs in nearly equal numbers, many women believe that they’re not being taken as seriously. Notably, they claim that they are making much less in advertising revenue.

Feelings of inequality among women bloggers have been reinforced through lists by the likes of Techcult, who recently listed its top 100 web celebrities (only 11 were women) and Forbes.com who created at similar list, which included 4 women out of 25 contenders.

Do you think that there is a noticeable imbalance between women and men in the blogging world? Or, is it a matter of quality content and other factors causing the divide?

At Nemo we have recently been spending much of our time in “thought leader” mode, to coin a phrase. Like any modern integrated marketing and branding company we are charged with advising our clients on how to approach the convoluted and ever-shifting world of social networks and social media advertising.

On this blog I have outlined many thoughts about why companies shouldn’t necessarily dive headfirst into the world of blogs and social media – here’s a post that includes a useful ‘how-to top ten’ list.’ It’s entitled “Why Does Corporate Social Networking Fail? It’s not cynical, and hopefully it’s useful to anyone pondering the issues of how their company should be represented online.

If we look at social networking before the advent of the internet, pre-Facebook etc, it literally meant that we gathered in tribes; ‘birds of a feather flock together’ goes the old saying. It’s as true today as the day the phrase was coined. Many people who have like-minded pursuits happily gather socially at predetermined venues or destinations to share their love of something. During my different life-stages in England growing up, that meant for me – soccer, pubs, punk rock.

Today we see the ability to share common interests multiplied as never before and of course I do mean “see” it; it’s called the Web and it lives up to its name.

At Nemo we don’t pretend to have the answers. We are still asking the questions. So I decided that it might be a good idea to invite Rachel Masters, Ning Inc’s VP of Strategic Development, to talk to us about the Ning social networking platform and the tools they are providing for anyone to build a social network.

Rachel walked our audience through a few examples of companies using the Ning platform to connect with their core consumers, but none was as compelling as the Saturn Cars site. It’s a great example of a company understanding and embracing America’s love affair with the automobile. If you love your Saturn this is the go-to site. If you are a marketing executive at a company that is thinking of embracing social media then have your team take a look at Saturn’s Ning network. It might just make you look like you understand social media….

Here’s a transcript of the talk on OakHazelnut from @caseorganic who was in the audience. And here’s a video of part of Rachel’s presentation.

While digging around the web for some ideas on social media that are more subversive, in other words ones that challenge the current model, [given that the current corporate model is "we should start a blog or a Facebook page,"] I came across an article on Marktd.com of a presentation given by Ed Cotton of Influx Insights at the PSFK Conference where he discusses Trends and Inspiration.

Based on the idea that trends are themes and attitudes that can be tracked over time, not fads, Cotton provides a list of 9 inspiration themes: Envy, Improvisation, Combinations, Looking Backwards, Frustration, Timing, White Space, Out of Context, Insight Driven. He then gives some interesting examples.

Envy: Creatives are envious of other creative people. ([For example the Beatles were envious of - and thus inspired by - the Beach Boys.]
Improvisation: You have limited resources and you take what’s around you and do something with it. Let’s play games with trends. [e.g Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies.]
Looking Backwards – We shouldn’t be slaves to the new. Frank Gehry was inspired by the 1920s movie Metropolis.
Frustration: Steve Jobs was frustrated with our cell phones, thus the iPhone.
Timing: The secret of success lies between “feels right” and outside confirmation. If you wait for the research to tell you you’re right, you’ll miss the boat.
White Space: Method saw white space in cleaning, resulting in the creation of non-toxic, well designed cleaning products.
Out of context: taking the subversive mainstream. Pixar has a college in their building. Take your creatives to places where the trends are, places where they’ll be inspired.
Insight Driven: IDEO noticed that kids hold toothbrushes differently. So instead of towing the line and making kids brushes smaller, they made them fun and easy to hold

The takeaway here is simple – immerse your people into a creative and inspiring environment from which they can learn ways to look at ideas and trends from a different point of view. It fits into Nemo’s methods as we consider our shop a “college” where our employees come to learn not just to work.

As I was perusing articles on Salon.com today, I came across the best advice column I’ve ever seen. Granted, most magazines and websites have them, but the questions (and answers) usually seem so dull and played out that I wonder if they’ve been fabricated by the editors. It’s the same churn, month after month.

On the other hand, Cary Tennis doesn’t take the easy way out. With a background that has taken him from working at Chevron to being in a punk rock band to writing for glossy magazines to waging a battle with alcoholism and back to Chevron again, Cary has lived a life full of ups and downs.

When you think about it, this is what gives Cary an edge with regards to writing an advice column. All those cuts and scrapes from his past help him relate to people and their problems.

With humiliating (yet captivating) column titles like:

1. I was masturbating in my office to kinky Internet porn when another mom walked in

2. My business trip ended with me in four-point restraints!

3. I’m sleeping with my best friend’s fiancé

4. I hit my sister in the head with my purse when I drink

5. My wife left me because the dolphins at Sea World gave me an erection

It’s hard to resist clicking in to read how Cary ties up such difficult and far-fetched subjects in a big, red bow and delivers a heartfelt message that the distraught can relate to.

In regards to his advice column, Carey says, “I’m no expert. I know the same things we all know. What I’m offering is, you know, good writing! Good writing can clarify overlooked or obscure areas of emotion. With sufficient craft, these things can be illuminated, and in a way that’s pleasurable to read. Plus I’m kind. I offer sympathy to people who are in trouble.” (Chris Colin).

Cary doesn’t just leave you (or the sometimes desperate advice seeker) with a short paragraph of pleasantries. He really digs in. It’s both refreshing and captivating.

As CNet reports today, Hollywood and YouTube may be edging towards their own version of Pax Romana. Meanwhile, beyond the learned walls of the law courts and Google’s battle with Viacom, we here at Social Cache have been scratching our heads over Viacom’s position.

Obviously Viacom is up in arms over what it argues is copyright infringement whenever one of its artists’ songs are used in a user-generated video. Their lawyers are even arguing that in most cases they want to set aside the notion of fair use. That in itself is ridiculous as in a lot of circumstances Viacom has stepped over the edge of copyright boundaries. In 2007 Viacom sent YouTube 100,000 takedown notices! And as this video from the EFF points out, many of those videos that Viacom had asked YouTube to remove, were not infringing anyone’s copyright.

We ourselves received a takedown notice and had a video removed from YouTube. The video was of one of our numerous snowboarding expeditions to Mt Hood and it included a clip of a song by the group White Zombie. We could have argued that under the law if we had used the music for parody, for comment, for criticism, for news reporting or for non-commercial use then we’d be in the clear. In this instance it was the latter – non-commercial use. We couldn’t be bothered, we weren’t that attached to the video and anyway, like millions of other folks, we put up videos at an alarming rate. Here’s our latest.

So here’s the Nemo and Social Cash POV. By removing our video Viacom denied thousands of people the pleasure of hearing a White Zombie song. One of its own artists! And no money was changing hands. One solution – Viacom should provide YouTube with a license from a roster of its artists who agree that their music can be used in a video for non-commercial use. In return YouTube provides its users with a simple license that allows users to add music from these artists to their amateur videos for non-commercial use for a small fee of, perhaps $3.00. Now Viacom and its artists get a share of this revenue, YouTube users won’t receive takedown notices, and Viacom can go a long way to recouping its, no doubt, millions of dollars it is spending on these lawsuits.

You’re welcome. Let me know why it won’t work….

Meanwhile over at MySpace, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation has a business that’s built on the backs of thousands of unsigned musicians. Who is looking out for them?

This is serious news when it comes to business networking and social media, I see a serious win-win here for both parties. There has been some debate recently about Facebook and how seriously it can be taken when it comes to businesses using the Facebook network to extend their social media ambitions as well as advertise across it. I would argue that the LinkedIn/NYT partnership steps up the ante for both Facebook and MySpace; the NYT, one of the world’s great media institutions that has seriously embraced the internet to further its business, may be on a path to shaking off its “Grey Lady” image and LinkedIn, which, although having only 25 million registered users making it small by social network standards, is by far the doyen of social sites for serious business users. We’ll see how this one unfolds.

Kudos, once again to Marshall Kirkpatrick for breaking the story.

Q. How do we reach these young people? A. You don’t, you wait for them to invite you

The social media folks and their blogs have been buzzing lately over a story that seems to have come from Deloitte but perhaps was more widely circulated by the WSJ. Josh Catone at Sitepoint drilled down further into the story from where it got picked up by Marshall Kirkpatrick on ReadWriteWeb.

Both Josh and Marshall have great points and their posts are a good read. Marshall’s post had the most provocative headline – Corporate Social Networks Are A Waste of Money, Study Finds. I thought I’d pick up the story there – A Waste of Money. Companies have a bad habit of throwing money at everything that moves, especially if it looks like “something we should be doing.”

Here are my thoughts distilled from my own writings on the subject and insights borrowed from Josh and Marshall’s posts:

Here’s an extract from my essay ‘On Social Media, Blogs and Advertising.’ – To understand and embrace social networking is to place the idea that says “technology makes this possible” to one side and embrace the idea of the basic human need to stay in touch with other like-minded people at all times. As Clay Shirky says “The desire to be part of a group that shares, cooperates, or acts in concert is a basic human instinct.” Read the rest of this post here.

With that thought what follows is:

Businesses can not “build a community” however much money they throw at the idea. They merely need to look outside of their own walls, find the influencers who are already championing their products and join the communities that already exist.

Businesses can not attract “visitors” as measured in traffic to their sites. People who enjoy their products will be talking about them elsewhere in other communities. See above.

Businesses have to realize that having a Facebook page for their products makes them look ridiculous and could actually harm the brand. See my post about Spraychel and “her” Facebook page brought to us by the folks behind I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter®

It is the way of businesses to make predictions about their market. They should not invest in software that makes predictions, or even social-networking technology, unless they have discovered a clear market need.

Positive word of mouth marketing by online communities that enjoy a businesses’ product is a far better metric than the ratio of visits to the corporate web site or its community.

Online communities led by influencers that champion a businesses’ products are doing just that, championing the products not the corporation that brought them to market.

So what should businesses do? Here’s a list that I have reworked to address businesses as it was originally written with rock bands in mind.

They should:
01. Run a blog to which actual company members post regular updates.
02. Ensure that the blogosphere is alerted to any new and breaking news or important posts.
03. Offer early access to special offers and discounts for their customers loyalty.
04. Give away free samples of their product.
05. Be active in their customers online communities.
06. Never push unwanted messages to their customers.
07. Ask their customers to interact directly with their product, for example through competitions and giveaways.
08. Allow the sharing of their products amongst a community.
09. Work closely with influencers.
10. Embrace radical transparency. Openly discuss their problems with their customers and allow negative comments to remain on their blogs.

That’s the top ten; number 11 in my list would include – have dedicated staff working on your company’s online communication 24/7.

Read more of our thoughts on Social Media here.

In his article Rich Men in Uniform, Christopher Tennant details the looks of a handful of the world’s most powerful men. Interestingly enough, these billionaires seem to stick with the same dressed-down looks, no matter the occasion.

Apple’s Steve Jobs prefers the soccer dad classics of a mock turtleneck, Levi’s 501 jeans and white sneakers while grocery store kingpin Ron Burkle looks the part of a weekend warrior in his unchanging black Ralph Lauren polo, boot-cut jeans and classic black Chuck Taylors.

Perhaps the lesson to be learned is that when you’re a billionaire many times over, you have nothing to prove to anyone. And, you probably have bigger fish to fry than trying to decide which pair of handmade Italian loafers you should wear.

The engineers and technologists who designed and built the giant Airbus A380 may well be proud of their accomplishments in attempting to reduce this huge aircraft’s environmental impact. As their web site says “[they took] a fresh approach to its environmental impact, too. With a new wing design and composite materials accounting for 25% of its structural weight, the A380 is a much more efficient aircraft all round. And by producing only about 75g of CO2 per passenger kilometre, the A380 is contributing to the aviation industry’s commitment to constraining greenhouse gas emissions.”

So, a full A380 carrying 525 passengers between London and Los Angeles, a distance of 8750km, will produce 344,531,250gms of CO2. Yes that’s 344 million – I’m just saying…hat’s off to the marketers for using grams instead of pounds. They’re European, so they can.

The site also mentions that “The A380 burns fuel per passenger at a rate comparable to that of an economical family car.” All I can picture here is 525 cars driving 8750km. And what is an “economical” family car?

They go on – “There’s the extra space per passenger afforded by its twin, full-length, wide-bodied cabins. The cabin air, recycled every three minutes to keep the atmosphere fresh. The natural light provided by 220 cabin windows. And while the A380 feels more natural inside, the environment outside benefits too. From the dramatically reduced external noise levels. From the lower fuel consumption and significantly improved CO2 emissions per passenger kilometre. From the increased capacity at airports and the reduced need for expansion.”

I love that phrase natural light provided by 220 cabin windows because every flight that I’ve been on the attendants can’t wait to tell the passengers to please lower your window shades as the “entertainment” i.e bad movie or TV, is about to begin. Whether you like it or not you are forced to sit in a dark stuffy tube while people with headphones on guffaw at lame jokes. Good use of “natural” though.

And this is a good one – “From the increased capacity at airports and the reduced need for expansion.” The boast here is that the ‘planes are so big they can deliver more folks to be packed into your airport’s long lines at immigration reducing the need for the airport authorities to expand their airports. Brilliant! What a relief for those in charge of our comfort while we struggle through their over-crowded airports, they don’t need to do anything but allow Airbus A380’s to land.

It gets better – “Some operators might, for example, choose to seat their First and Business class passengers on the upper deck –providing a corporate jet-like environment for these clients – while configuring the A380’s main deck for an all-Economy layout.”

Dear Airlines, when you configure the ‘planes for your fleet, why not put the great unwashed underneath with the freight and be done with it?

Other than an elongated literary adventure through Cormac McCarthy’s ‘Border Trilogy,’ reading ‘All The Pretty Horses,’ ‘The Crossing’ and ‘Cities of the Plain’ in the summer of 2005, followed in 2006 by reading McCarthy’s masterpiece, the aweful ‘Blood Meridian‘ [and I use aweful by way of its true Middle English definition - "Filled with awe, especially: 1. Filled with or displaying great reverence.",] I’m not inclined to reading novels. McCarthy’s ‘The Road’ and ‘No Country For Old Men’ were both outstanding and Martin Amis turns out great work but I prefer non-fiction; currently I am buried in E.O.Wilson’s ‘Consilience’, re-reading Robert Wright’s ‘The Moral Animal’ and am halfway through John Gray’s ‘Al Qaeda And What It Means To Be Modern’ having finally finished his ‘Straw Dogs: Thoughts On Humans and Other Animals’ for the third time. This summer’s less than light reading list just grew by two – the Amazon package today contained John Gray’s ‘Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and The Death Of Utopia,’ and ‘Heresies: Against Progress And Other Illusions.’

Otherwise I’m keeping an eye on the Madonna – Guy Ritchie marital farce.

I’ll freely admit that I was a long standing Twitter holdout. With profiles on Facebook, Myspace, Flickr, Behance, Buzznet, Live Journal and my personal blog already clogging my schedule, the motivation for adding another social networking site to my list of engagements was definitely lacking. Months of being preached to about the positive virtues of Twitter fell onto deaf ears.

The turning point came last week when I was staying with a well respected blogging friend in New York City. She explained that for bloggers, Twitter is a worthwhile tool because it can be set up to notify followers of when you’ve updated your blog. Essentially, folks following you on Twitter are provided with a quick, on-the-go reminder of what you’re up to and in return, you can gain some steady traffic to your blog posts.

After one more deft attempt to escape the world of Twitter, my friend took over and signed me up on the spot (while I continued to protest in the background). Within three days, I had 60 ‘followers’. And, the rest is history; a Twitter fiend was born!

While some have found the advent of Twitter (and for that matter, Plurk) to be a distraction from blogging, Darren Rowse of ProBlogger holds the opposite view:

I personally find that Twitter informs and inspires my blogging. The interactions that I have, the conversations that I see others having, the questions that I’m asked and the answers that other users of Twitter and Plurk give me are constantly feeding me with ideas to blog about.

So, why should you join the masses of twittering addicts?

Some Benefits of Twitter:

1. Find Blogging Inspiration

If you’re stumped on what to write about, posting a quick ‘tweet’ (a post or status update) in the form of a question or poll to Twitter can provide a platform for your biggest fans to brainstorm and tell you what they really want. In a matter of minutes, it’s possible to have an abundance of clever ideas gathered on your screen via users from around the world!

2. Remind Followers to Check Out Blog Posts

It is possible to set up a feed that publishes your blog headlines directly to Twitter with a handy link. Some people just don’t have the time to keep up with RSS feeds and linking your article in this manner can be much more user friendly.

3. Readers May Make a More Personal Connection

Twitter has the ability to take on a more spontaneous, playful side of a blogger’s personality. Since tweets are often fired off multiple times a day (whereas a blog post from the same user may go live once a day or even less frequently) and posted on the spot with a maximum of 140 characters, they tend to be short and sweet and more to the point since space is limited. There’s not enough room to defend your views, to delve into a disclaimer, or to give a back story.

When blogging, many of us focus upon a niche topic (examples being music, street style, self improvement, D.I.Y. crafts) and may not want to clutter the front page of our blogs with random, off-topic personal tidbits such as, “I’m in line at the store and just saw Michael Jackson in a wheelchair” or perhaps “Courtney Love just passed me up in a shopping cart!” Yet, these present tense mumblings give those subscribed to your Twitter feed a way to bond with you as a real person, not just the persona they encounter on your blog.

Additional Twitter Pluses:

a. The site is very user friendly. It takes a max of five minutes to sign up and get a profile in place.

b. Unlike the social networking behemoths Myspace and Facebook, Twitter is free of advertising (for now).

c. Keeping track of your favorite posts is easy. If you see a tweet of value, click the star directly to the right of the message and effortlessly bookmark it for future viewing:

The Downsides of Twitter

Of course, not everyone will agree that Twitter is the equivalent of the second coming of Christ. Some points of contention are as follows:

1. Limited Comment Length

Since the number of characters on a Twitter post are limited to 140, it’s not always possible to reply in an intelligent, in-depth manner. Dave Allen’s take on its shortcomings is pretty accurate. He says that:

I still believe a good, well written blog is the place for conversation. Twitter, a micro-blog, is not. I use my Twitter account to drive traffic back to my blog where the conversation can really open up. After all, Twitter only allows 140 characters so truncated updates are the norm, which is fine. On both my blogs, the other being Pampelmoose, I enjoy reading comments that can often be longer than the original post – something that is impossible with Twitter.

2. The Distraction Factor

While firing off short and succinct messages may be fun, the time it takes to do so can add up quickly. Some people become so preoccupied with tweeting that their blog postings begin to dry up. In my view, Twitter is not a replacement for blogging but rather a tool that complements and reinforces blogging efforts.

The Bottom Line

Twitter is a free, easy to use social networking service that isn’t cluttered with ads and other unnecessary applications. If you’re an active blogger, Twitter has the ability to keep on-the-go readers informed and provide them a more personalized experience. If you use it with a purpose in mind, it’s a win-win situation for both you and your subscribers.

An oil rig off the coast of California

Here in Portland I am seeing signs that the price of gas is making a difference in how people get around the city. Bus ridership has spiked, there are less cars on the road during the commuting hours and bicyclists seem to be everywhere. Yesterday as I walked my dog along the banks of the Willamette River, I noticed far more sailboats than the motorized variety. Maybe the price of gas is making Americans think twice before getting into the car? Maybe.

I carpool to the Nemo warehouse and it’s still a drag to see that of those cars that are on the road I’d guess that 95% of them are occupied by only the driver. And don’t get me started on the hypocritical Prius owners who fly past at speeds that exceed the legal limits. And on Sunday’s the Hillsdale Farmer’s Market is filled with people buying fresh, locally-produced organic food while the parking lot and the surrounding streets are crammed with their cars. None of this makes sense. If you’re concerned perhaps you can leave a comment on their blog.

It seemed that once gas went through $4 a gallon and the $100 fill up entered the public’s economic equation we’d see a marked change in the way we would use our energy. Unfortunately that’s really not the case.

Portland is one of the more environmentally-friendly and green cities in North America. If we can’t break the automobiles stranglehold on our city then what hope for other cities that are less friendly toward buses and bicyclists? Portland has also shown strong support for ending the war in Iraq. If we disagree with the Iraq war, and the inevitable future Middle East wars that will be fought over oil and water resources, what will we Portlanders do at home to reduce our dependence on foreign oil?

I argue that if we are unwilling to drastically reduce our gasoline use then it is hypocritical of us to oppose off-shore drilling in California and drilling and exploration in Alaska. We simply can’t have our cake and eat it.

Today, President George W. Bush plans to lift a presidential ban on offshore drilling to combat soaring energy prices, a largely symbolic move unlikely to have any short-term impact on the high cost of gasoline.

Who will stand in his way this time?

Related Post: I’m Sick of the Co-Opting of Green

Once the mainstream media and the more hysterical tech blogs have got over the fact that the success of the iPhone 3G launch caused Apple’s servers to be overloaded, we can sit back and take stock.

I own the iPhone v.1 and I’m currently happy without 3G access so I remain content with my device. One reason for staying put with the original model is that the new software update from Apple brings some rather cool new applications [or Apps in the vernacular,] that improve the original phone’s productivity.

I chose a couple of productivity apps, Zenbe, a list sharing tool and Jott, a voice to text tool. I got AirMe for uploading my iPhone pictures up to my Flickr account and added MPG and Spend [no link available, tsk, tsk] so if I care I can track my miles per gallon in the Element and set budgets for my gourmand extravaganzas. These apps all perform well without G3 and most were free. One app that fell into the epic fail bucket was Reqall. Couldn’t sign up on the iPhone and couldn’t load the web site either. Fail! Turns out that Jott does the same stuff anyway.

The most interesting app of all is Loopt which enables users to broadcast their whereabouts and send a status of a broad set of services and find interesting locations and reviews nearby. This could be the next breakout social networking platform as it works best from the phone [mobiles, not just the iPhone] and is simple to update ala Twitter. In fact it has a Twitter plug-in so you can post once and hit Twitter too. Follow me on Twitter here.

One problem though – Loopt could be a predators dream. In fact Loopt’s Be Safe page spells out in no uncertain terms that you need to control who has access to your location.

Anyway, here’s my thinking behind the title of this post. David Griner wrote a post entitled Are Blogs Still Good Places for Conversation? which at first glance I took as simply a Google bait tactic. The answer would seem to be “of course they are.” He raises a good point but I still believe a good, well written blog is the place for conversation. Twitter, a micro-blog, is not. I use my Twitter account to drive traffic back to my blog where the conversation can really open up. After all Twitter only allows 140 characters so truncated updates are the norm, which is fine. If I follow Marshall Kirkpatrick on Twitter I get up-to-the-minute breaking tech news from him but I prefer to read his blog at Read Write Web for a more in-depth review. On both my blogs, the other being Pampelmoose, I enjoy reading comments that can often be longer than the original post – something that is impossible with Twitter.

Joining the conversation and being invited in are two things I have stressed when it comes to advising our clients on their forays into social media advertising. A blog is the right venue for extending conversations, not a micro-blog. By all means post links to your original content stories to Twitter so that interested followers can link to your blog. Be sure to use FriendFeed to share your blog posts with others, use Tumblr too for the same reason, but understand that many of the social networking arenas, Twitter, Loopt even Facebook, are way ahead of the general online populations’ capacity to juggle all of them, and those folks not partaking in every widget, bell and whistle are your customers too.

Run a blog, embrace radical transparency, get invited in to communities that might enjoy your products and join the conversation. But whatever you decide to do, don’t do this – OHSU Director’s Blog. If you don’t immediately see why feel free to ask me.

Well not exactly. Portland, Or, the home of Nemo and thousands of cyclists has a problem it seems. The price of gas, the economic slump and the fact that Portland is a cyclists dream city has led to an uptick in the amount of folks biking everywhere. Inevitably they run into vehicles, and I’m speaking both literally and figuratively.

It’s causing a lot of friction. Case in point being this video of a fracas, that took place outside our offices here at Nemo, between a motorist and a cyclist caused, according to the driver, by the cyclist not obeying traffic lights. The biker literally attacks the guys car with his bike.

On the local blogs both sides have weighed in about who’s right and who’s wrong but there is only one solution – car-free streets for cyclists and pedestrians [who are treated worse than cyclists by drivers if you ask me.]

It’s not often I come across a major musical artists’ web site and find that I can say to myself – “these guys got it right.” Today I visited John Mayers site and although I’m not a fan of his music the site is a great example of how to get the message across simply and elegantly while giving his fans the ability to interact on many levels. The tie-in with Blackberry is genius too. The Blackberry micro-site just spreads the Meyer messaging and interactivity far and wide by offering exclusive Meyer content – audio, video, pictures and more.

John says “hi.”

John Meyer has a blog and he seems to use it, at least I hope it’s him because the most egregious offense is having someone else blog for you. I’m going to keep checking back on this one. In fact there are multiple blog links on the home page. This one is written by “Scotty” who may be in the band or may be the T-shirt vendor, it’s hard to tell. The blog focuses on the new T-shirts – “A collaboration with Loomstate – a completely organic, sustainable tee. Very limited… We only made 587 of the shirts, each hangtag is hand-numbered.”

And there’s even a place to send in your encore requests for the shows you’ll attend. Customer happy time I reckon. And client happy too, Blackberry made a wise choice sponsoring this musician.

Credit: Mayer web link found on the Mediapost blogs.

The news today is that Proctor and Gamble is getting into the music business. Just as Starbucks is going in the opposite direction and exiting the CD sales business, more brands are jumping in to fill the void left by the collapse of the CD retail store business. Music sales in the UK were once again down 11% over the same period in 2007.

For the labels, attention from product companies is a good thing. I see the logic here. CD sales are plummeting and online sales are not filling the void, a company comes along that wants to license the record label’s music to promote a brand and it appears that a match has been made in heaven. Rhianna had a lot of success this way working with Totes Isotoner to help them improve sales of umbrella’s. Umbrella was the title of her hit song, I wrote about her arrangement with Totes here.

Proctor and Gamble, and other companies using music to promote their brands, are jumping in deeper though:

“At a time when online file-sharing is rampant, record stores are closing and consumers are buying singles instead of albums, getting into the music business might seem like running into a burning building. But as record labels struggle to adjust to a harsh new digital reality, other companies are stepping up their involvement in music, going far beyond standard endorsement contracts and the use of songs in commercials. These companies — like Procter & Gamble, Red Bull and Nike — are stepping outside of their core businesses to promote, finance and even distribute music themselves.”

I believe all of this extra-curricular activity by these brands may pay off for them in the long term. The music fan has shown her willingness to buy music online although only singles, not albums. Album sales are no longer the preferred format. The labels created this nightmare for themselves when they scrapped the single as a sales format. They blamed their losses on file-sharing online but they ignored their own disastrous moves in the market place. They weren’t listening to their customers. And then they began to sue them. Even Apple can’t persuade music fans to buy albums.

There is a lesson here though and it is one that Starbucks learned the hard way. Brand and product companies should not get too deep into the music sales business. The P&G deal with Def Jam may work well as it is a joint venture where presumably each side does what they do best – Def Jam runs the label side, P&G markets its product with Def Jam music and pays for everything.

I discussed the following issue in a recent post: To the music fan music becomes cheapened by being used as a commodity to sell products. The artists behind the music have their celebrity enhanced and they then go on to use their brand to sell more products. Music fans understand that music is now a commodity and refuse to pay for it. The music industry and the artists both complain that no one pays for music and to account for the decline in sales accuse us of stealing it online. The commodity is over-priced; no one is buying it.

Unless you are a brand with a product to sell.

That’s not a boast. Another answer to that question is simple; if you write a blog, you own PR too.

Press releases by the thousands hit editors desks and inboxes daily. The best editors have no doubt created a system for separating the wheat from the chaff when it comes to a good story, but they are still gatekeepers although their gates are becoming smaller and easier to bound over. We are in the age of PR 2.0 as Brian Solis calls it. He as written a paper entitled ‘The Social Media Manifesto – Integrating Social Media into Marketing Communications.‘ He spells out his case very succinctly and avoids most of the jargon that you might expect in a paper on this subject [although some clichés remain.] You can read it here.

A Press Release? Here’s one definition from many that I found online – ‘An announcement of an event, performance, or other newsworthy item that is issued to the press.’ The definition is straightforward and very, very dry, a phrase that unfortunately describes every press release I’ve ever seen. So how does your story get noticed through the crowds and the white noise?

You could go crazy with all the options that are available but I’m thinking that a less is more approach may be more effective. Again common wisdom suggests that you should use Digg, Del.icio.us, MyBlogLog, Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, etc, etc. Although those tools are all undoubtedly useful, the problem is that you have to manage all of these accounts and that is time consuming. Also is your story relevant, to say your Facebook group? In fact have you asked yourself – “Does my company even need a Facebook group?” Just because you can doesn’t mean you should. And of course this all begins with the best story that you have to tell, otherwise all of your efforts using any social media will fail. A non-story is a non-story, period.

This is our current approach at Nemo:

We have multiple blogs and bloggers and we experimented with social media for a while before jumping in and writing about our ideas and thoughts. Social Cache is an example of how we intend to participate as thought-leaders and contributors. We are not selling anything here.

Our blogs have distinct voices and authority in the areas of music at Pampelmoose, fashion at Nubby Twiglet, art and design at strange|beautiful and photography at Nemo Productions & Photography.

We create videos and upload them to YouTube and Vimeo [33,460 folks watched that one,] and we drop our photos off at our Flickr site.

We have a Muxtape so you can listen to what we are listening to.

We have LinkedIn profiles for all of our executive staff, here’s our Creative Director, Mark Lewman’s. We even have a Facebook group. [I'm struggling with this one, more later.]

We are lacking in the blogroll department. We need a stronger blogroll on Social Cache.

We have our own Ning social network specific to our company. It’s been in private beta but soon it will be unleashed to the world. Here’s a sneak peek of some of the Nemo team celebrating the delivery of new web sites that we built for HP Blackbird and VooDoo PC. Click those links to see our work.

Find more videos like this on NEMO

When it comes to PR and marketing at Nemo we are following the basic rules of social media. We listen and we participate. We wait to be invited in. We start conversations. We encourage comments.

And we love our employees, even when they leave us…watch the video below.

Find more videos like this on NEMO

Crazy, entertaining, popular? Yes.

Watch it here. Some folks mention 45 million views but I don’t see those numbers. As of today it has 3,262,406 views. Still, nothing wrong with those numbers. As Seth Godin asks, are you sponsoring or advertising on the right sites?

Via Seth’s Blog

In the many years that I have had a MySpace page I have never once clicked through on any of the ads pushed to me. Here’s an example in the clip I took from the home page above. I never read Spin Magazine and I can’t stand Coldplay. Even the tag line from Chris Martin – “Our album will probably save the world” fails to entice me as the comment is so shallow. The good news though is that the digital issue of Spin is free. Now they’re thinking.

I’ve been a proponent of the Long Tail theory since stumbling upon Chris Anderson’s blog of the same name. Reading the book affirmed some thoughts I’d had about how certain niche products found a life online that they most certainly would not have found in a regular bricks and mortar retail outlet.

Granted, because of my background in online music distribution the theory immediately appealed to me. I saw it as an idea that would help unlock the gatekeepers stranglehold over the discovery of music either as CDs or legal music files. Those gatekeepers being terrestrial radio, the record companies and online music retailers such as iTunes who wrapped their music files with DRM.

A simple explanation of the Long Tail theory is that the internet gives us unparalleled access to more products across the “tail” and doesn’t just expose us to those mass products at the “head.” It suggests that people are willing to search and pull a song from say, Tortoise, an alternative music outfit that sells modestly, rather than sit back and be bombarded by iTunes trying to sell them, or push, a song from Coldplay. As the theory goes, Tortoise could make a living selling its music vertically in its slice of the tail.

Like any good theory it is open to question and discussion. This is where Anita Elberse steps in with her article in the Harvard Business Review entitled ‘Should You Invest in The Long Tail?’ Meanwhile Chris Anderson has been gracious enough to accept the challenge to his theory by responding to it on his blog.

I need to spend time with the article as it is not only lengthy but includes a lot of data and links to sources, as well as concluding with advice to different businesses on how or not to include the Long Tail in their marketing efforts. Anderson’s responses will take some digestion too. Perspective and insight is required before comment. That’s why it’s frustrating to me that people like Lee Gomes of the Wall Street Journal’s Portals column has jumped in gleefully accusing Wired magazine [where Chris Anderson is Editor-In-Chief] of having a “template” where they “take a partly true, modestly interesting, tech-friendly idea and puff it up to Second Coming proportions.”

Gomes is of course allowed his opinion of Wired magazine articles but I wonder if he has really had time to read and digest Elberse’s paper as well as study Anderson’s responses. It’s also odd that he blames bloggers for “talking up the theory, which is no wonder considering how it held out the promise that even the most obscure among them could win a robust audience.” As a columnist for the WSJ he has been happily debunking the Long Tail theory since it inception as he did in this article from July 2006. Is he more fearful of the Long Tail theory or of the bloggers who may gain audience share along the tail away from the WSJ head?

Whatever the outcome of the debate between Elberse and Anderson I doubt that there will be immediate agreement on the benefits or not of the Long Tail. One things for sure, it is way too soon to be joyfully jumping upon its supposed grave.

David Bowie in persona as Ziggy

David Bowie is, or more correctly, has been one of our more chameleon-like musical performers since the late 60’s. By 1972 when Bowie had adopted a new persona, Ziggy Stardust, his performances were memorable not only for introducing a new genre, Glam Rock, but for his wildly coloured orange hair, his sci-fi inspired modern outfits and his androgynous stance. As the music critic Robert Hilburn says of Bowie in retrospect, it was hard to tell “whether Bowie wanted to be the new Elvis Presley or Judy Garland.”

Bowie’s use of personas to present his music as well as his world-view continued through the albums Aladdin Sane [A lad insane] and Diamond Dogs, and reached its apotheosis with his Thin White Duke persona for the album Station to Station, which many people criticized as too close to a portrayal of a Nazi for comfort. Bowie and his supporters blamed his cocaine addiction at the time. He recovered from the bad press to deliver a trilogy of his greatest work Low, Heroes and Lodger, known as the Berlin Trilogy, all produced by Brian Eno.

All of this brings up an interesting question – Which version of Bowie do/did you relate to the most?

Bowie’s Ziggy persona catapulted him to fame in the USA, but who was more famous? Bowie or Ziggy? If we take the dictionary definition of persona it defines persona as so: the mask or façade presented to satisfy the demands of the situation or the environment. And identity as so: the state or fact of being the same one as described.

That’s not helpful. Bowie could be identified as Bowie as he steps from the stage still in his Ziggy costume if we look beyond his Ziggy persona. For example a fan might exclaim – “that’s David Bowie dressed as Ziggy Stardust.” More likely though a fan would exclaim – “There’s Ziggy Stardust.” Persona and identity become inseparable.

And of course all these thoughts bring me to Social Media which was not an online phenomena in 1972. With regard to personas vs identity on Facebook for instance, I read this post on idunno.org – “The ease by which fake profiles can be created on social networking sites clearly defines the separation between the two concepts. From a technical point of view a users identity is tied to authentication and authorisation (claims in SAML talk); your identity on facebook is your login information nothing more, and we’re gradually becoming well trained not to give that away. What other people recognise “you” by is your persona; the public facing information you provide; and there is no way to check the veracity of that persona, except by validating those incidents or attributes known by shared experience.”

In other words we can argue that we know Bowie was “acting out” his persona mainly in performance because we can “validate those incidents” as mentioned above. On Facebook we may never be able to “validate those incidents” amongst our hundreds of “friends.” I’ve argued before that especially for marketers, they don’t exist.

Meanwhile Bowie was very successful at it, as Robert Hilburn points out referring to the soon to be released 1972 Santa Monica concert – “For the encore, he turned to “Rock ‘n’ Roll Suicide,” a delicate, anthem-ish number from “Ziggy.” Reaching out to the audience, Bowie offered these soothing words: “You’re not alone . . . gimme your hands.” Thousands in the auditorium reached out to him.”

What does Hilburn mean by him?

I love coincidence. Coincidence I mention because as I reach the end of John Gray’s book, Straw Dogs, for the third time in as many years, I read chapter 20, ‘The Soul In The Machine,’ an hour before leaving the cabin this weekend. On arriving home last night I caught up with Friday’s edition of the NYT and read a review of the new Pixar movie, Wall-E, by A.O. Scott. In the first paragraph of his review he tells us – “This is a world without people, you might say without animation, though it teems with evidence of past life.” He also mentions that in the first 40 minutes of the movie – “barely any dialogue is spoken.”

Another coincidence here is that it is as if the movie’s director, Andrew Stanton and his co-writer Jim Reardon, had also read the last few chapters of John Gray’s book. According to A.O. Scott the movie’s underlying theme is far from a happy one – “…… but ‘Wall-E’ surely breaks new ground. It gives us a G-rated, computer-generated cartoon vision of our own potential extinction. It’s not the only film lately to engage this somber theme. As the earth heats up, the vanishing of humanity has become something of a hot topic…”

The Earth devoid of humans, or at least where the remaining humans are reduced to living in cities “emulating the noble idleness of hunter-gatherers, their needs met by new technologies” as Gray writes, is an Earth left to conscious machines. The writers and director of Wall-E suggest that this has already occurred and conscious machines are all that remain on the planet. As he says – “Wall-E’s tender regard for the material artifacts of a lost civilization is understandable. After all, he too is a product of human ingenuity.”

“In his recent documentary Encounters at the End of the World the film director, Werner Herzog muses that “the human presence on this planet is not really sustainable,” a sentiment that is voiced, almost verbatim, in the second half of Wall-E.”

As Gray writes in his passage ‘The Soul of the Machine,’ – “Those who fear conscious machines do so because they think that consciousness is the most valuable feature of humans – and because they fear anything they cannot subject to their will. They fear the evolution of conscious machines for the same reason they seek to become masters of the Earth.”

Gray predicts – “As machines slip from human control they will do more than become conscious. They will become spiritual beings, whose inner life is no more limited by conscious thought than ours. Not only will they think and have emotions. They will develop the errors and illusions that go with self-awareness.”

That sounds like a movie called ‘Wall-E’ to me.

One other coincidence regarding the movie was that today I read a post by Seth Godin on his blog entitled “Bravery and Wall-E.” At first I thought from the title that by bravery he meant that we humans are brave to be advancing our technological know-how ever forward as we invent “living software” and biological chips, machines that Gray predicts will move us humans toward extinction. Unfortunately that wasn’t the case – Seth discussed the marketing [or lack of] and how the movie will make “plenty of money.”

The parable of ‘Wall-E’ transcends marketing and money.

The view from the cabin

It’s been a while since I’ve been completely cut off from all means of electronic communication. Two and half hours from Portland and you hit the western edge of Central Oregon, the mobile phone drops off the grid, the AT&T wireless card hunts aimlessly for a signal – nothing but digital silence.

Five adults, two teenagers and two younger ones walked and biked the river trails and cooked, conversed and read books and magazines. We socialized. My iPod wired to an old boombox and my Canon G9 were the only reminders of my digital life.

The Metolius River

I read an article in Newsweek about Facebook being responsible for the drop off in college reunions [an aside: being English I never quite grasped the concept of reconnecting every 10 years with ex-college mates, I must admit.] The premise, as recounted by one youthful member of the digerati, is that Facebook now fulfills this need; everything one needs to know about your former college friends is laid out for all to see online. I’d argue that this is not true. The premise requires that everyone’s Facebook profile be a true and honest reflection of their true “selves.” Unfortunately that defies reason; people’s Facebook personas are not true reflections of their “selves,” in fact they are another “self” altogether. Photos are cropped and edited to provide satisfaction to the poster not the viewer, and details of marriages, relationships and whether the person has children or not are often left vague.

There’s a reason for this. Originally Facebook was a solution for college kids to remain firmly in touch, but as that audience has broadened far and wide demographically, it has become a safe haven for people to explore their “second lives.” The only way to discover if your ex-sweetheart, dorm mate or college team buddy has actually remained a perfect, toned 150 lbs of lean muscle with no obvious receding hairline is to go to that 10 year college reunion. This is also why marketers will have a hard time reaching social network users.

A shadowy social network group.

Facebook is getting an assist from Visa Inc.’s marketing machine in its struggle to lure more advertisers. To date, Facebook has not had as much success as was expected in garnering revenues from advertising. The plan with Visa appears to be aimed at small businesses who are using Facebook to look for new customers.

Michael Liedtke reports:
Visa’s service is designed to provide small-business owners with tools and tips on attracting new customers, trimming costs and other ways to make more money. Businesses that belong to the Visa network on Facebook also will be able to communicate with each other to share ideas or even negotiate deals. Internet search leader Google Inc. is providing some of the features on Visa’s business network, including maps, calendars, word processing and a new template for creating expense sheets and business cards. And The Wall Street Journal and Entrepreneur magazine will contribute articles addressing questions posed by businesses that belong to Visa’s Facebook network.

Facebook’s struggle to produce revenue from its site sounds similar to the problems that MySpace has been having. Facebook has 80 million users who play games, share photos, rate music and track their friends’ activities – the idea that they can be bothered to click through on an advertisement that is not relevant to them, and one that just randomly appears on their home page or profile, is a marketing stretch.

As Michael Liedtke writes:
…while the array of applications have helped make Facebook even more popular, few programs are producing revenue for the site, and Facebook still hasn’t proven that its social playground is an effective advertising forum. Finding the right advertising approach also has been a challenge for other social hangouts like News Corp.’s MySpace. Even Google, which runs the Internet’s most lucrative ad system, has had trouble marketing on social networks.

Advertisers and marketers are labouring under the assumption that the information that Facebook has gathered about its users makes it easy to target different groups of them. This is a dubious notion at best. They are a moving target.

As Liedtke points out: …..some advertisers fret that Facebook’s audience will resent commercials amid all the site’s frivolity. Others are leery about their brands showing up on Web pages featuring racy or unsavory content.

Stay tuned.

After reading Nubby’s post on The Power of Celebrities as Brands I came across a post on Sasha Frere-Jones’ New Yorker blog where he talks about Jeff Leeds, a music reporter for the New York Times, who was recently laid off. Frere-Jones has entered into an email discussion with Leeds where they discuss music writing and criticism today:

LEEDS: I’m not sure that it’s so easy anymore to write about the art without acknowledging the commerce or vice versa. It’s also just more fun, as a writer, to inhabit the middle. There is a case to be made that the cultural role and the experience of music now are just inextricably tied to commerce and the new ways that artists and listeners perceive each other. Even as a fan, isn’t your relationship with music and artists at least somewhat different depending on whether you subscribe to e-music, share a station with a friend on Pandora, or watch someone’s show on your cell phone? Is U2 still the same U2 if they’re in an iPod ad? I think the message and the medium are much more intertwined than they were ten years ago.

FRERE-JONES: This behavior parallels the world of online friendships, at least in form. People who could just as easily call or e-mail each other decide to make conversations public through blogs or Twitter or MySpace comments. The platform chosen for each message changes the effect of the words, who can read them, and how long they will hang in the air. (The Web is creating a multiple-exposure version of memory: words remain, reappearing over and over, even if nothing more than cocktail chat. “Nice dress!” echoes in the hall of mirrored servers. An LOL is not an LOL is not an LOL.)

LEEDS: I think that sort of transparency, where we’re all declaring our positions publicly, is here to stay. In music it means that all these little tribes and congregations of fans can mobilize in really powerful ways. And that in turn is contributing so much to the changes you see in the relationship between the artists and the machinery, the industry underneath and around them. It’s a crucial space to watch. I always think of music as Patient Zero in all the disorder that is changing everything in entertainment and media, including, by the way, newspapers. It’s worth paying close attention.

Leeds and Frere-Jones are suggesting here that transparency, aided and abetted through the use of social media, affects the way that music fans “perceive” the artists and the music industry. With its machinations no longer hidden from them, fans interact differently with their favorite musicians. As musical artists use their celebrity to sell products one area where this perception could become dangerous is over-exposure.

In an article in the New York Times, Nothing Sells Like Celebrity, the story of the teenage R&B pop star, Rhianna, her song ‘Umbrella’ and her deal with the umbrella manufacturer, Totes Isotoner, is typical of the arrangements made between a celebrity’s brand and a product these days:

“Rihanna and her representatives wanted Totes to do more, however, than merely use her [song] to peddle a product. They wanted Totes to create customized umbrellas featuring sparkly fabrics and glittery charms on the handles — all recommended by the emerging star and her team. Totes also guaranteed the singer a percentage of the sales of the umbrellas”.

Apparently the arrangement between the star and umbrella company was successful but what does this say about the future of music as an art form? As Leeds says – “I’m not sure that it’s so easy anymore to write about the art without acknowledging the commerce or vice versa.” To paraphrase him – Is Rhianna still the same Rhianna if she’s in an umbrella ad? Do her fans blur the line between seeing her in a video on MTV and then seeing her in a Totes ad?

Sales of hip hop and R&B music have dropped off precipitously lately and many have blamed the over commercialization of the music and its ties to products; too much bling in other words. Does hearing a song repeatedly through an advertisement cheapen the artist and the song? And then in turn, does social media – Facebook, Twitter etc, allow these “little tribes” as Leeds calls them, share the idea that ‘too much exposure is quite enough thanks, we’re moving on to the next artist’…become gospel? I think so. Leeds and Frere-Jones are on to something.

As these all important “little tribes” spin off into tightly-knit social groups online, all of which will independently coalesce around their favorite subjects, be it knitting, hang gliding, musicians, movies, actors et al – the large social media sites and networks will fracture into millions of laser-precise spin-offs. As Frere-Jones says, the words and messages of these “little tribes” become “echoes in the hall of mirrored servers.” As he also says, the web and social media are “creating a multiple-exposure version of memory,” – is that U2 on MTV or U2 in an iPod ad, I may ask myself?

Beware all marketers who intend to try and reach these ever-shifting, nomadic, online groups; as I said in a prior post – the people who are members of these groups don’t exist, only their personas do.

The music industry should be careful too. Music becomes cheapened by being used as a commodity to sell products. The artists behind the music have their celebrity enhanced and they then go on to use their brand to sell more products. Music fans understand that music is now a commodity and refuse to pay for it. The music industry and the artists both complain that no one pays for music and to account for the decline in sales accuse us of stealing it online. The commodity is over-priced; no one is buying it.

First the email in my inbox.

Introducing Keeping Score with Audrey!

Starting this week, TrueCredit’s Newsletter Editor-in-Chief, Audrey O’Dell, brings you a new blog in the Learning Center. Inspired by readers’ questions, Audrey will offer you the scoop on how to get the most out of credit card reward programs and uncover new and different ways to pay off credit cards (debt snowball, anyone?) and that’s only the beginning! Ever wonder how the credit crunch is going to impact you personally? (Maybe it already has!) Whether your mortgage rates will go up or your credit card rate will come down? Ever transfer a credit card balance to another card offering a lower rate—and then been sorry? Or was it a good idea? Read about these credit issues—and more—in Keeping Score with Audrey. It’s just one of the great features TrueCredit brings you to help you manage your credit. Make the TrueCredit Learning Center a regular pitstop on your road to credit health.

Ok I’m interested – I visit Keeping Score With Audrey.

The first thing I notice is the text on the page is left justified so tightly it almost escapes the page but the instant giveaway that this “blog” is not actually a real blog is the simple fact that no one is home. You cannot comment, all you can do is read what is basically an ad for True Credit’s services. You cannot contact anyone, there is no ‘about’ page – who is ‘Audrey,’ does she even exist?

Wait, there’s more – if you attempt to navigate away from this “blog” you receive the following message:

True Credit’s management have made a poor decision here. They clearly do not understand how important authenticity is in the blog world. If they had really done their homework this area of their site would not exist as it stands today. They have broken all the rules of how to reach their customers online.

The debate over global warming may well continue for many years. Whatever the consequences of our spewing pollutants into the atmosphere day by day one thing seems certain – sources of fresh, potable water are becoming scarce. In the western states of the USA rivers are running dry, reservoir levels are shrinking and wildfires, sparked by heat-burdened, tinder-dry woodlands are burning by the dozen and it’s only June.

The states of the USA will have to learn to share; asking people to use less water will not work – look at the oil situation and American’s unwillingness to cut back on driving. Beyond our borders, countries that do not have a plentiful and easily accessible source of water will soon look to their neighbors or nearby countries that have a plentiful supply of what is becoming known as ‘blue gold.’ There will be envy.

T. Boone Pickens

When an oil man becomes a water baron we should all take note. In an article in Business Week Susan Berfield tells us – “If water is the new oil, T. Boone Pickens is a modern-day John D. Rockefeller. Pickens owns more water than any other individual in the U.S. and is looking to control even more. He hopes to sell the water he already has, some 65 billion gallons a year, to Dallas, transporting it over 250 miles, 11 counties, and about 650 tracts of private property.” He makes no bones about his ambition to sell water – “There are people who will buy the water when they need it. And the people who have the water want to sell it. That’s the blood, guts, and feathers of the thing,” Pickens says.

Meanwhile Americans spent nearly $11 billion on bottled water in 2006, when we could have guzzled tap water at up to about one ten-thousandth the cost. That fact comes from a book by Elizabeth Royte called Bottlemania – How Water Went on Sale and Why We Bought It. She also tells the tale of how the residents of Fryeburg, Me, are trying to stop Nestlé’s Poland Spring from sucking 168 million gallons of water a year from its pristine aquifer. All of which goes into plastic bottles.

Something has to change as, just like oil, there soon will not be enough to water to go around. And those eight glasses a day that some “experts” say we should drink? Not true. As more clearheaded experts point out, drink when you’re thirsty. Soon you may not have that choice.

Related Post: Fiji Water: A green product?

The Tower of Babel

Cities live and breathe. As I wrote in a post last week on Social Media, cities are no more artificial [technological] than the hives of bees. As we go about our daily lives [mostly unconsciously,] we psycho-drift from block to block through neighborhoods that we know well, in amongst communities that have been drawn together by like-minded people. Think East Village in Manhattan, Venice Beach in Los Angeles, Camden Town in London, Pigalle in Paris – and here in Portland, the Pearl District.

Where we tend to live and work is often amongst communities of like-minded people, unless, as in the USA, one lives in a far-flung exurb and commutes for hours to work. Over centuries we have moved as a species from the rural countryside into large urban centres. As we have done so the ‘idea’ of the city sprang up. Throughout different periods in history, planners and architects have had differing ideas about how to cultivate urban living arrangements. There has been some success and much failure.

As James Kunstler writes in his book, The City in Mind, – “[the] nation’s massive suburban build-out was an orgy of misspent energy and material resources that squandered our national wealth and left us with an infrastructure of daily life that, left as is, has poor prospects in the new century.” Kunstler points out that as global warming, oil depletion and other epochal disorders are upon us, we must reconsider what is a ‘city.’

He argues that one of the chief side effects of the move to suburbanism is “the cultural destruction…especially the loss of knowledge, tradition, skill, custom and vernacular wisdom in the art of city-making that was thrown in the dumpster of history….”

A city is not just a series of streets and avenues with buildings on either side, a city is people, culture, society and the networks that form to bind those societies together into communities. The suburbs were literally a dream, an idea that General Motors had of a drive-in utopia in its plan for a World of Tomorrow. Kunstler goes on to point out the folly of the “Edge City,” a term coined by the writer Joel Garreau. Kunstler says “I essay to show how Atlanta took the urban model of car-crazy Los Angeles to its most ludicrous, and in my view, terminal stage. With Atlanta, you can forego agonizing over the future, because the present doesn’t even work there.” As he points out “our human ecologies – namely our towns and cities – remain devalued, depopulated and decivilized.”

In America we prefer landscape over urbanism. What then now as our dependence upon oil, refined as gasoline for cars that transport one person at a time from these suburbs to the cities, proves the folly of these far-flung suburbs? Will we see a move toward urban vitality? A migration back to the city?

Government spending at any level, state or local, does little to help. We need to “nurture the unplanned civic engagements that make mixed-use city life so appealing” – writes Douglas Rae, the Richard Ely Professor of Management and Professor of Political Science at Yale University, in his book, City; Urbanism and Its End. “Small scale retailing, neighborhood clubs, informal enforcement of sidewalk civility and new urbanist design may be the keys to the future.”

I agree with Rae on the idea of “nurturing unplanned civic engagements” as he puts it but that’s as far as I would go. The rest of his thought sounds like the issue of we humans being in control of our destinies again, trying to have the answer that is beyond nature, beyond what we actually do when we congregate in cities. Our desire for urban centres always seem to be about ‘order’ or ‘cleanliness’ and ‘organization.’ So on one hand we have the thinkers – the planners and the architects, and on the other – the citizens who actually inhabit the space that we call city. What we might call the ‘Few and the Many.’

Alongside a piece by the New York Times film critic, A.O.Scott, called Metropolis Now, where he writes about the idea of how yesterday’s film sets became today’s cities, there is a sidebar that takes some lines from Fritz Lang’s 1927 film “Metropolis” – “The minds that had conceived the Tower of Babel could not build it. So they hired hands for wages. But the hands that built the Tower of Babel knew nothing of the dream of the brain that had conceived it. One man’s hymns of praise became other men’s curses.” There’s that word again, dream.

We humans dream. We dream of controlling nature, we dream of saving the earth, we dream of organizing our cities. Those dreaming deny the fact that cities live and breathe. Not the concrete architecture, not the buildings – the people that inhabit them. When someone talks of Rome having a ’soul, a feeling’ they are misinterpreting the difference between the city and its cultural makeup; people can be said to have souls and feelings, we ‘know’ this – buildings don’t have soul and feelings.

As Fernando Pessoa writes – “Only if you don’t know what flowers, stones and rivers are can you talk about their feelings. To talk about the soul of flowers, stones and rivers, is to talk about yourself, about your delusions. Thank God stones are just stones, and rivers just rivers, and flowers just flowers.” We dream and we delude ourselves.

Richard Florida, author of The Rise of the Creative Class dreams of organizing urban centres [which he correctly identifies as 'place'] around the idea of a mythical “creative class” who are bound by the idea of the “three T’s,” Technology, Talent and Tolerance. This dream involves cities having a strong technology base, a “creative” class as he calls it, and a strong gay community. And of course the idea he spins is that to grow a city’s economic base it should invest in nurturing the “three T’s.” Once again – The Few and the Many. Planners and architects can no more decide what a city’s culture will be than we know that a stone has feeling.

The fabric of a city is its population. Like a bee hive [architecture] or an ant colony [social network], natural rules of engagement spring up through the daily interaction of those who inhabit a city. They commune. They gather in tribes in their ‘places.’ They share information, ideas, things they like. They become less ’selfish.’ They are city.

As John Gray writes in Straw Dogs – “Anyone who wants to escape human solipsism should not seek out empty places. Instead of fleeing to the desert, where they will be thrown back into their own thoughts, they will do better to seek the company of other animals. A zoo is a better window from which to look out of the human world than a monastery.”

Most large cities have a zoo.

Listen to and download Psycho Drift. Shriekback – Psycho Drift

For references –
References:

James Howard Kunstler – The City in Mind. Published 2001 by The Free Press.
Joel Garreau – Edge City
Douglas W. Rae – City; Urbanism and Its End. Published 2003 by Yale University Press.
Richard Florida – The Rise of the Creative Class. Published 2002 by Basic Books.
A.O.Scott – Metropolis Now. Published in the New York Times magazine June 6th 2008.
Fritz Lang – Metropolis
Enrique Peñalosa – Man With a Plan. Published in the New York Times magazine June 6th 2008.
Fernando Pessoa
John Gray – Straw Dogs. Published 2002 by Granta Books.
Solipsism
Shriekback – Sacred City [Compact Disc]. Released by World Domination Records 1992.
Barry Andrews – Lyrics to Psycho Drift.
Peter Carey – 30 Days in Sydney.

Roy Christopher has posted his annual Summer Reading List. Click on that link and all will be revealed. For those not inclined to click through here’s my contribution, followed below by Roy’s.

Dave Allen

I’ve traveled less this year than is normal for me. No Gang of Four activity anymore, so no more mind numbing journeys by train, plane, and automobile alleviated only by the power of a good book. If I was a humanist I could say that at least my carbon footprint is lower, but the Earth has plans for us, and we can’t do a damn thing about it.

That thought has always been at the forefront of my mind as I have tracked the environmental/green movements, and then followed the chattering classes’ attempts to reduce the United States’ energy dependence as they dropped into the arms of the more-than-willing Toyota Corp, helping to push sales of the Prius through more than one million.

More than one million new vehicles added to the world’s roads. Well done. A bicycle and public transport would have actually made a difference.

That brings me to the book that affirmed my thoughts on our epic — but inevitably useless — human battle to change the course of the Earth. John Gray’s Straw Dogs (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) published in 2002 is a book that I keep returning to. As the UK author, Will Self says, “Straw Dogs is that rarest of things, a contemporary work of philosophy devoid of jargon, wholly accessible, and profoundly relevant to the rapidly evolving world we live in.” Gray simply and concisely slices through the human conceit that we are radically different from other animals.

Otherwise I rediscovered Philip Roth especially his wonderfully depressing Exit Ghost (Houghton Mifflin). I also finally got around to reading Roth’s The Plot Against America (Vintage). Denis Johnson’s Tree of Smoke (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) was a great read on long trans-continental flights and Robert Hughes’ memoir Things I Don’t Know (Vintage) was a fascinating read from the man who brought me two favorites, Barcelona (Vintage) and Culture of Complaint (Grand Central Publishing).

————–

Roy Christopher

David Mitchell Cloud Atlas (Random House): This collection of nested-doll stories from 2004 is like exploring an abandoned building via descending staircase, stopping on each floor to read some left-behind letters, a travel journal, or a mystery novel. Like Mitchell’s previous novel, Ghostwritten (Vintage) [also recommended], each section of this one refers to the others. It’s like reading pieces of several quasi
-related books that somehow add up to an engaging whole. I snagged this at Powell’s during my last few days in Portland based on its cover alone.

Sherry Turkle Falling for Science: Objects in Mind (MIT Press): One of the largely unsung voices of the digital revolution, Sherry Turkle has been hard at work for over two decades trying to keep tabs on technology’s influence on our lives. Inspired in the early eighties by Seymour Papert’s essay on an interest in the inner-workings of gears and how it lead him to study math (included in this volume), Turkle has assigned her students at MIT to write a similar piece. Falling for Science collects fifty-one of these essays — by her students and colleagues over the past twenty-five years — explaining how certain physical objects influenced them to pursue a life of science. Legos, bicycles, erector sets, computers, and other usual suspects get their due, but so do shirts, walls, bubbles, and keys (among many other things, both exp
ected and surprising). It’s an interesting look at the subtleties of design, influences (often unintended), science, and inspiration.

Mary Roach Bonk (W. W. Norton): Mary Roach has a knack for finding intriguing book topics (and writing interesting books about them, of course). They’re all slightly askew, but one can easily see how anyone would be interested in them. In Stiff she followed the afterlives of cadavers, in Spook she followed the afterlife of afterlives (ghosts), and in Bonk she, ahem, gets science laid. It’s everything you always wanted to know about sex — if you’re a science geek.

Mikita Brottman The Solitary Vice: Against Reading (Counterpoint): If there were a Bibliophiles Anonymous, this would be its bible. Brottman isn’t actually averse to reading, quite the opposite, but in The Solitary Vice, she explores the reasons that attitudes toward reading have been so historically conflicted. Coincidentally, her book is a damn good read.

James D. Watson Avoid Boring People (Knopf): As marginally interested as I am in James Watson’s Nobel-winning scientific work, I’m finding his memoirs completely enthralling. Here’s one of the co-discoverers of the building blocks of life breaking down his academic career into first-person narratives and — true to its title — easily digestible lists of practical advice, unwritten protocols, and lessons learned. This book proves that Watson’s gift for scientific inquiry is well matched by his wily way with words.

I’m also currently reading and re-reading the following: Gilbert Ryle The Concept of Mind (University of Chicago Press), Jack O’Connell Word Made Flesh (Perennial) [Thanks, Ashley], Terry Eagleton The Gatekeeper (St. Martin’s), Christopher Vogler The Writer’s Journey (Michael Wiese Productions), Etienne Wenger Communities of
Practice (Cambridge University Press), Rebecca Solnit Wanderlust: A History of Walking (Penguin), and Andrew Ortony (editor) Metaphor and Thought (Cambridge University Press).

The back cover of the Damaged Goods EP

On June 18 I spent an afternoon with the University of Oregon’s philosophy department class presenting a talk on Gang of Four and our place in the “creative, potentially transformative popular music pantheon.” It was fun. As a band our achievements are well known, mainly in critical circles, but also from the few thousand passionate hard core fans who continue to hang on dearly to their vinyl copies of ‘Entertainment!’ For a band that didn’t sell very many albums we continue to draw new listeners and thought leaders to our music. Hence the invite to speak today.

It was fun taking questions from the students, and very good questions too, about our lyrics, our political stance, how we messaged through our music. We also discussed where music is going and how will musicians be able to make a living. The students appeared to take to heart my idea that musicians are no longer in the music business, they are in the T-shirt business.

As I researched for the talk I came across the Damage Goods EP ripped from vinyl and made available as a download along with a hi-res file of the back cover. 30 years ago, on June 28th and 29th 1978, in Cargo Studios just outside Manchester England, the original Gang of Four line-up recorded the EP. Two days, live recording, minimal overdubs, recorded and mixed. Three songs – Damaged Goods, Armalite Rifle, (Love Like) Anthrax.

It’s amazing to listen to today [the students loved it.] The disarming, sprawling charm of the non-production stands out. Performed basically live this version of Damaged Goods seems now perfect – unhurried, raw, prickly guitar, Jon sounding like he’s just yelling in a room. I’m glad I never trust my memory.

Dave Allen, Director, Insights & Digital Media, Nemo Design

Gang of Four – Damaged Goods (EP version 1978)

Damaged Goods 3 song EP Click, right click or control click to download. It’s a 12mb zip file and it includes a hi-res back cover image.

For musicians, 1000 true fans may be the way to lift their sales, and therefore their careers, out of the flat plains of the Long Tail. Looking for information about 1000 fans, I entered ‘1000 friends’ as a search term in Google – it returned 12.2 million results. Here are the Google results.

In this context there isn’t much difference between ‘fans’ – who support musicians and artists, and ‘friends’ – who tend to support causes and the environment. For instance, 1000 Friends of Houston wants 1000 people to donate $100 each to kick start an initiative to improve livability in Houston. Meanwhile the musician Jill Sobule put up a web site asking for donations to make a new album. She needed $75,000. If you visit the site today she happily proclaims that she has achieved her goal and recording is under way. Here’s her original post setting out her goals and the different levels of donor participation.

Kevin Kelly, who describes himself as follows: “Kevin Kelly is a Senior Maverick at Wired magazine and is currently editor and publisher of the Cool Tools website” says in a post at his site, The Technium, “A True Fan is defined as someone who will purchase anything and everything you produce. They will drive 200 miles to see you sing. They will buy the super deluxe re-issued hi-res box set of your stuff even though they have the low-res version. They have a Google Alert set for your name. They bookmark the eBay page where your out-of-print editions show up. They come to your openings. They have you sign their copies. They buy the t-shirt, and the mug, and the hat. They can’t wait till you issue your next work. They are true fans.”

Kelly’s article [from which I borrowed that image] provoked a lot of comment and in one case an outright rebuttal from a musician who has been using the 1000 fans technique to sell his music. As this musician wrote, he couldn’t make a living from operating with such low income. [I would argue that the real point of reaching out to your true fans is networking and not about trying to make a living solely from the income derived this way. It should be treated as another arrow in the quiver of tools that musicians already use.] Kelly then wrote another article entitled ‘The Case Against 1000 True Fans.’ The debate continues.

I like the idea of 1000 true fans. It’s rather like a patronage and when it works it must be wonderful to be that artist who feels the affirmation of her fans. Yet what if it doesn’t work? Fundable is a web site that helps artists by putting up the page that solicits the donations. If the artist requests $5000 for her next work to be created but falls short of that goal then no one pays. Fundable helps in two ways 1. It’s an easy way to create a web site for this purpose, and 2. Artists learn how many fans are willing to support their endeavor before starting a new project.

Arguably these groups of donors are more than just ’super fans’ of artists, they are a micro social network. In April, Peter Bowman, a contributor to the web site Internet Evolution wrote a post about the emergence of micro social networking. He argues that companies and businesses that have built micro-sites for their brands are now branching out and creating micro social networks and asks:

“Will this growing micro-social trend dilute the existing power of social network elites like Facebook and MySpace , or will they empower more people to participate in a wider selection of online communities based on their individual needs and wants? Large brands and businesses have been using micro-site spinoffs to vertically promote products and services while targeting a very defined and loyal online market. Micro-sites have worked wonders for companies that want to align something specific to a targeted online audience. Now, there is a growing movement to transform micro-sites into micro-social networks to become more in line with Web 2.0 applications that aim to engage users with more interactivity and peer-to-peer networking options.”

I think he’s right. As people tire of the faceless anonymity of Facebook and MySpace they will either seek out or start their own network to attract like-minded people to their particular cause, movement, musical group or hobby; a group such as the one that donated $83,000 to Jill Sobule. Sobule should start a Ning network to help all those people stay in touch with each other. After all, they share a common goal.

On a much larger level, Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails had huge success with his direct sales set up where he sold a deluxe package that was a combination of MP3s, CDs, DVDs and a book that he called an “Ultra-Deluxe Limited Edition” package available in an edition of 2,500 units. Critics scoffed but he sold every one of them raking in around $750,000 gross. That’s a micro social network in action. His next release, ‘The Slip’ comes as digipak CD in a limited edition of 200,000 units.

Dave Allen, Director, Insights & Digital Media, Nemo Design.

Related Post: On Social Media, Blogs and Advertising.

Obama’s viral timepiece.

These days the advertising and marketing world is all abuzz with phrases such as – Social Media, Social Advertising, Facebook Ads, Mass Media Networking Advertising…..etc, etc.. In the last two weeks I have been a panelist at the L I S A seminar in Portland and the Hawaii MusicTech Conference in Honolulu. L.I.S.A., which is an acronym for Lessons In Social Advertising, was aimed at marketers and advertisers who [for some reason] don’t understand social networks or haven’t yet worked out how to advertise effectively to them. It focused on topics such as ‘What is social advertising?’ and ‘How do you get young people to recommend your brand?’ The Hawaii MusicTech panel discussed how musicians could effectively use social networks such as Facebook and MySpace to reach an audience and communicate with them.

Two sides of the table as it were. One group wants to advertise, or push, their messages to a mass audience, while the other wants to create a network of like-minded people who hopefully will pull content such as free MP3s and then “evangelize” on behalf of the musicians by spreading messages by electronic word of mouth. With no hint of schizophrenia I happily migrate between both camps.

To understand and embrace social networking is to place the idea that says “technology makes this possible” to one side and embrace the idea of the basic human need to stay in touch with other like-minded people at all times. As Clay Shirky says “The desire to be part of a group that shares, cooperates, or acts in concert is a basic human instinct.” Think about rock concerts for a minute…..

Most people that take a position on social networking and advertising come at it from a technological point of view, as in “technology has created the means for everyone to be connected and to stay in touch.” I disagree with that statement because it removes nature from the game. It is entirely natural for humans to want to interact as often as possible as we are all social animals. Cities are no more artificial (technological) than the hives of bees. Therefore the Internet is as natural as a spider’s web. People who believe that technology is driving our interactions are missing the point – we ourselves are technological devices, invented by ancient bacterial communities as a means of genetic survival. Bottom line – social media is as natural as apple pie as we all want to be as connected as possible – we can’t help it. [A really good book from which I have borrowed some thoughts is 'Straw Dogs' by John Gray, professor of European thought at LSE, published in the UK by Granta.]

Online networks might be seen as antidotes to boredom at work, school or college. These new social networks do more than transmit information about their members, they change behaviour by propagating moods. These days we can all share “news” really fast, even about ourselves – for example, my Facebook or Twitter status might say “I’m heading to the beach in Waikiki…” and the mood that simple statement makes might become very contagious.

The Internet confirms what we have all known for a long time – the world is ruled by the power of suggestion but in the case of social networking it is “influencers” that lead the suggesting. Then suggestions might become “group think.” John Gray writes – “in evolutionary prehistory, consciousness emerged as a side effect of language. Today it is a by product of media.”

So, the question currently being asked by companies and advertisers is “how do we market and advertise to social networks?” Having to ask that question suggests the rocky ground that online advertisers are standing on. For instance, Jack Myers sees nothing but doom and gloom in online marketing: He says “Advertising is simply not a sufficient revenue model to sustain content companies into the long-term future.” And goes on -

“I have preached evangelically for nearly three decades about the bifurcation of the media and advertising marketplace into 1) a transactional commodity business model and 2) a relationship-based brand-focused premium marketplace. Most media companies and agencies are investing appropriately in the technology resources required for their transactional businesses. [But] Brand building, relationship-based business models and premium-priced enterprises require completely new and innovative models, and can take years before they generate returns that justify the investments. Industry realities place enormous pressure on executives to adhere to traditional business models, and companies that foster and advance innovation are often drained of resources before they can deliver the return-on-investment demanded by the stock market, equity rights holders and VC investors. Typically, implementation of new business models must be forcefully imposed by the CEO, need the blessing of investors, and they cannot be managed by executives trained exclusively in the ways of traditional media and advertising.”

Neil Perkin in a slideshow entitled ‘What’s Next in Media’ that can be found here says that today – Social Media is counter-intuitive to communications media. Here’s one of his slides that shows just how counter-intuitive things have become for marketing online:

Meanwhile, the old way of marketing is through push messaging and therein lies the mistake of many of today’s marketing managers. Take a look at this slide to see how things don’t stack up nicely into a marketing message or ‘drop’ that has been long planned waiting its turn on the calendar.

The Linear model above reminds me of traditional TV and Print advertising. Some people in advertising and marketing today still view the Internet as a “channel” rather like TV.

Let’s consider another buzz phrase – viral marketing online. The success of YouTube in extending an advertising campaigns length and reach is now common currency. We’ve all seen the videos, perhaps even this one – My girlfriend and the Wii Fit. 2.2 million views and going strong.

The viral aspect of YouTube pleases advertisers and marketers because they can take pride in the statistics – 2.2 million viewers, that’s great! Not so quick though. The wise online marketer knows that it’s not all about page impressions. Broad use of metrics is far more important – users, time-spent, interactions and pass-alongs. The Wii certainly got a lot of exposure in that video but how can the results be tracked? Where’s the ROI?

Those YouTube stats don’t show the whole picture. It is clear that the video is very popular and it fits the rules of users, time-spent, interactions and pass-alongs, but there is no clear ROI except in its “value.” By value I mean that the brand is being talked about, the brand via the video is being shared, people are “spending time” with the brand. The ROI though is difficult to judge. Even if Wii sales were to jump by 5% in one week can we really say it was due to this “viral” campaign. Probably not. The video’s value will continue throughout its lifetime on YouTube. Talk of value over ROI makes marketing managers queazy.

Viral campaigns are not just online. From Adrants: Jack Goldenberg tells the story of how he and Kevin Glennon turned a custom-made Obama for President watch into what could become a fairly sizable viral campaign for the candidate.

“Most people think of viral marketing as something they’ve seen on YouTube or a similar site. But in reality, a viral is any communication that causes one person to be so affected by “experiencing” the viral that they communicate it to another.” He also argues that “Happy Meal toys were an in-home reminder of the need to visit McDonald’s. Kids would see two or three of them on their desk in their room and say, “Mom, Dad, we HAVE to go back to McDonald’s. I need 3 more Star Treks Happy Meals to complete my collection…..the Happy Meal was viral – kid to parent-multiplied by the millions of kids who frequented McDonald’s.”

That’s an example of an early viral campaign. We can perceive its “value” but we can’t perceive its ROI. And that’s why Jack Myers, as I quoted above, says “(completely new, innovative models) can take years before they generate returns that justify the investments.” If as marketers we don’t understand social media and merely pay lip service to viral marketing then we are basically flying by the seat of our pants.

Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief of Wired Magazine and blogger at The Long Tail, has pitched in to the social media advertising conversation with a post entitled You may be on Facebook But the Money’s in the Long Tail. He also posits that “social networks should be a feature, not a destination.”

As Chris says, and I agree, “I’ve been thinking a lot about how to integrate social networking into websites better. Right now the world is focused on stand-alone social networking sites, especially Facebook and MySpace, and the fad of the moment is to take brands and services there, as companies build Facebook apps and MySpace pages in a bid to follow the audience wherever they happen to be. But at the same time there’s a growing sense that elements of social networking is something all good sites should have, not just dedicated social networks. And that suggests a very different strategy – social networking as a feature, not a destination.”

He has a proviso too – “social networking to me means the tracking of individual preferences and behavior and giving users the ability to draw upon implicit or explicit connections between them and other users to do something useful.” This brings me to Ning, a social network platform that both Chris and I like. As he says “Ning, suppresses its own brand for the sake of those of the microsites it hosts.” Go here to see how the hip hop/rap label, Rawkus, uses Ning as its entire web presence.

Chris goes on to say – “As I think about the current Facebook craze and the notion of it as an all-encompassing platform, sucking in functionality from other sites across the board, I find myself skeptical. With my Long Tail hat on, I think that one-size-fits-all will fail in social networking, just as it has everywhere else.”

Meanwhile MySpace admits that it is not making as much money through ads as it would like. See Selling Ads For MySpace is Hard Work. MySpace COO Peter Chernin said:

“We remain incredibly optimistic about social media. But there are specific challenges 1) Tons of inventory. Lack of scarcity creates a liquidity challenge. Working on bringing big brands aboard. 2) People who are visiting social networks are there for different reasons, different uses. Figuring out how to target. 3) What’s the value of a “friend”? Trying to figure out new metrics to communicate with marketers.”

Bottomline: It’s the wild, wild west out there.

Anderson points out that ad rates on MySpace go for an astonishingly low $0.13 cents per CPM (one thousand impressions.) So that’s $0.13 on a general-purpose social network like MySpace and on his Ning-hosted network DIYDrones he’s getting $7.00. Even with a more generous scenario–$0.50 on MySpace and $5.00 on a focused Ning site–the difference is still a factor of ten. He believes that as big networks like Facebook and MySpace struggle to target ads based on the faint signals of consumer behavior in a generic social network, the smart money is going to the niche sites, where laser-focused content and community makes targeting easy. I couldn’t agree more. Also see: Facebook Ads Don’t Rock an experiment by Bob Gilbreath, an advertising executive who ran an ad on Facebook. It’s a real eye-opener. And another – Ad CPMs Are Higher In The Tail. And of course companies are springing up that think they have the answer to your problems in dealing with big social networks. Here’s one.

What this all points to is that companies should be advertising directly to those niche groups and networks that include people who would like to hear from their brand. The brands need to wait until they are invited in. A mass, scatter-shot approach to the large social networks will only fail.

Companies also need to consider Radical Transparency. For those unaware of this concept there’s a great article here on Wired Magazine’s site. I also wrote about it myself when Wired’s web site crashed. The basis of this theory is that you open the company’s doors [only as much as you like] by creating communication between your company and its fans and detractors. It’s a big step and for some, especially executives, it will cause a great deal of unease.

Wal-Mart used this approach to great effect. Here’s the original story from the New York Times and here’s just one bloggers’ reaction. And here is the Wal-Mart blog.

As the NYT article says “Known for its strict, by-the-books culture — accepting a cup of coffee from a supplier can be a firing offense — Wal-Mart is now encouraging its merchants to speak frankly, even critically, about the products the chain carries. This unusual new Web site, which was quietly created during the holiday shopping season, has become a forum for unvarnished rants about gadgets, raves about new video games and advice on selecting environmentally sustainable food.

Corporate blogs are nothing new — General Motors, Dell and Boeing have them — but Wal-Mart’s site, called Check Out, turns the traditional model on its head. Instead of relying on polished high-level executives, it is written by little-known buyers, largely without editing.”

And the key point there is “without editing.” Once a company opens the doors it can not close them. If a company starts a blog [and it should] it can not moderate the comments. And the CEO and other executives should not be contributing to the blog if they do not have the right “authority” or “voice”. By that I mean authenticity. It’s an overused word at times but in the right context it is completely accurate. If a CEO were to jump on the blog to blow her own trumpet non-critically about a company’s service or product the readers would see through it immediately. Being authentic means the blog author is a “trusted source” and this trust can never be abused.

A blog is a micro social network. My blog garners around 100,000 unique visits a month and its adherents are seeking out what I have to say about music, technology and the web. I am well versed in those things. I have an opinion about them. I also provide free music downloads from artists that I have “filtered.” I only post music from artists that I like and I believe that my audience will like them too. In short I have become a trusted source [people like my opinions,] a filter [people share my musical tastes,] and I am an influencer [I push certain artists and online companies that I support,] as well as an authority [people believe that I know what I am talking about.] A company’s blogger or bloggers need to have all these bases covered if they are going to safely cover the company’s communications through the blog.

Meanwhile the executives have to sit back and allow the comments, both good and bad, begin to flow. They can never interfere if they want the blog to be taken seriously. They will feel insecure and perhaps a little nauseous but if they wait it out it will work fine. It works for Wal-Mart, the world’s biggest retailer.

A company with a good blog policy will be listening to its customers and then shaping its communications around that data. It will also create content that is both relevant and hopefully surprising. Influencers will pass along the good stuff creating the viral moment that marketers pray for. Then people in the outer circle of the influencers will also start to talk about the brand, and as they do the company has to make it very easy for its core fans to spread the word. Do not fear negativity, it is just more communication – let it roll. There should never be a barrier to communication or interactivity. Remember, it’s not about technology, it’s about people. Bloggers have to be about having an opinion and sharing it but never about reporting….it’s a two-way conversation.

Sometimes people look at it backwards. Points 1 and 2 in this slide are wrong. As I said at the beginning of this post, we are technological beings and we are naturally immersed in technology; it can’t be any other way. And you can’t enforce social cultures online as there is no central “being.” Facebook’s “soul” is merely the millions of disparate people who are members. When Facebook goes away, as it will, those millions will migrate to the next application that allows them to socialize freely and easily.

For marketers this is a huge dilemma. In social media we create a selfless or virtual “self” – for instance, in the Facebook friends network one might see a coherent global pattern but that pattern only emerges from the activity of all its members (friends). The group or network seems to be centrally located but in fact it is nowhere to be found. No one has the slightest idea what these people do or want; they actually don’t exist. The good news is that within each of any of these social network groups resides at least a couple of influencers; again, companies and brands must wait to be invited in. These are parties that can’t be crashed.

Dave Allen, Director, Insights & Digital Media, Nemo Design.

The following URLs link to people, companies, articles or stories that are referred to in this post:

Grammy’s Hawaii MusicTech Conference
LISA 08
Content Marketing = Brand New Marketing
What’s Next In Media
My Facebook profile
My Twitter
My music and technology blog, Pampelmoose
Clay Shirkey’s blog
Jack Myers’ Web Site
Neil Perkin’s Blog
Wii Fit YouTube video
Adrants Obama watch story
Obama watches web store
Wired Magazine
You may be on Facebook but the money’s in the Long Tail
Social networks should be a feature not a destination
Rawkus, a social network on Ning
Selling ads on MySpace is hard work
Bob Gilbreath’s Facebook ad experiment
Ad CPMs are higher in the tail
Lotame.com
Blog reaction to Wal-Mart blogs
NYT story on Wal-Mart blog
WalMart blog

There is no business more maligned right now than the music business so it’s always a surprise to me to find that brands and their agencies haven’t been following the story. Where once every college students dream was to graduate and land that much-sought-after job in the mail room at Warner Bros Records, I would argue today that they are far more interested in joining Google or one of the myriad of new media start-ups rather than getting a job at, or being signed to, the now unsexy music business. In fact one of them is no doubt creating a new, new, new media company as I write.

And then along comes Macys’ American Rag brand campaign – from AdWeek under news, non-traditional – a series of documentary Webisodes will follow the lives of five young people who want to break into the music business. The series, “Ragged Road,” launches in the fall. WPP Group-owned MEC Entertainment developed the show, which will play on YouTube. Nancy Slavin, svp of marketing at Macy’s merchandising group, said this marks a first for the brand in “doing something wholly dedicated to a communications strategy on the Web.”

So Macys’ merchandising group has plunged head first into a web-only strategy. Brave. The clothing brand targets 18-24 year-old males and females and they have deduced that music is one of the passions of this demos primary targets – true, but – music is just one of the passions not the primary passion.

“There’s a lot of people who want to get into the music industry, but don’t know how to go about it. So, we said, let’s find five people who have a passion for the business and want to see what the career opportunities are and what different paths there are to get into the music industry,” said Chet Fenster, managing partner at MEC. – I believe that statement is rather insulting to kids today, it sounds like a justification for making the webisodes rather than reinforcing a need that came out of a focus group session with young people.

All five cast members will be wearing American Rag clothing. They will also be given the opportunity to shop for the brand as they travel across the country. For YouTube users interested in buying the clothes, the Macy’s site will serve as a shopping portal.

Cast members huh? I don’t understand why the agency didn’t find a cool young band that are actually working hard on the road but are struggling to make it. That would have been the truly authentic route to go. Driving a bunch of “cast members” around the country on a bus and giving them “the opportunity to shop for the brand” as they go doesn’t sound so compelling to me. A more authentic way into the music market was showcased recently by Dennys, the restaurant chain, with their Adopt-A-Band campaign where they picked up touring bands and gave them a helping hand in the way Kids like their fashion to be unique. of free meals and other opportunities. Bands and music fans are very nocturnal and always hungry at after hours so this made sense in many ways. Dressing up a “band” in American Rag outfits and giving them a bus to travel on is so fake. It doesn’t take into account the harsh reality for thousands of young touring bands in the USA (gas at $4 bucks a gallon anyone?) nor does it take into account young kids’ propensity for mashing up their fashion sense into something unique, their own style.

On reviewing ‘Netherland,’ a novel by Joseph O’Neill, in the New York Times’ Book Review section, Dwight Garner reflected thus: “But sorting through the pile of so-called 9/11 novels is a sad exercise, one that grows more pointless by the day. They’re all 9/11 novels now. It’s impossible, though, to stop scanning the horizon for something else — the bracing, wide-screen, many-angled novel that will leave a larger, more definitive intellectual and moral footprint on the new age of terror.”

That last italicized sentence struck a chord with Alec Niedenthal a student at Mountain Brook High School ‘08 Birmingham, AL; that fact I discovered of course on his Facebook page. He wrote a letter that I have posted below that challenges the assumption that all great post 9/11 novels must come from the long list of novelists that have been writing for many years prior to 9/11. He also challenges the reviewer and the Book Review editor to look “right under your collective noses” as he points out that the novels that Dwight Garner yearns for “will spring from the iMac-fettered keyboards of the young, challenging, Facebook-and-MySpace-addled minds that you have so hastily jettisoned as literary jetsam.” And at the end he ever so slowly twists the knife – “Perhaps it would not trouble you to take a peek.” Nice. And here’s a piece that Alec wrote for ‘Sup Magazine.

To the editor:
I found Dwight Garner’s review of Joseph O’Neill’s “Netherland” (May 18) to be virtuosic in nearly every respect, but that is not why I write. Garner struck a chord with me, and probably the vast majority of younger readers, when he so impeccably communicated the longing for, the necessitation of that transcendent Great Post-9/11 Novel: “the bracing, wide-screen, many-angled novel that will leave a larger, more definitive intellectual and moral footprint on the new age of terror,” he writes so consummately.

Don’t worry; we’re working on it. You’ve heard it straight from the tropical mouth of a teenager who is entirely conscientious of the metamorphoses in ideas, principles (or lack thereof) and influences being undergone by your Youth right under your collective noses: the next Great American Novel will come not from Pynchon, Wallace, DeLillo (he’s already had his turn anyway) or any other of your literary heroes.

It will spring from the iMac-fettered keyboards of the young, challenging, Facebook-and-MySpace-addled minds that you have so hastily jettisoned as literary jetsam, from those who see and comprehend, still to the delirious ignorance of the villainous Powers That Be, incalculable brands of grade-A terror being perpetrated unabashedly both by those whom we trust and those whom we loathe.

The literary call to arms sounded long ago (only many neglected to listen), and, Mr. Editor, well, we’ve been whiling away for a long time, persisting on raw fish and Red Bull in the frozen caverns of the blogosphere; and we don’t mean to boast, but, to be perfectly honest, we think you’ll be more than impressed. We’re standing beneath the adit of our long-desolate cave, proffering a sheaf of papers that you might consider a manuscript.

Perhaps it would not trouble you to take a peek.

ALEC NIEDENTHAL
Birmingham, Ala.

On May 22nd as the actress Sharon Stone was about to enter a fund-raising gala for the American Foundation for AIDS Research, she said this to a journalist: “I’m not happy about the way the Chinese are treating the Tibetans because I don’t think anyone should be unkind to anyone else. And the earthquake and all this stuff happened, and then I thought, is that karma? When you’re not nice that bad things happen to you?”

In the resulting firestorm of criticism in Chinese news media and on blogs that followed her remarks, Dior, which has a contract with Ms. Stone for a face cream, removed her from advertising in China, fearing a backlash. Like many global luxury brands, Dior, which reported double-digit growth in China for the first three months of the year, looks to emerging consumer markets as a major source of revenue and obviously does not want to get embroiled in a political debate about China and its actions in Tibet.

I can understand that American’s want to be very vocal about the situation in Tibet but I’m not sure that they are reading the signals from the Chinese people too well. The Chinese, particularly young people, are adamantly against any interference from the West in Tibet and are strongly supportive of the Chinese government’s actions. Ironically, Chinese youth and young adults are looking to the West, and especially the big brands, to improve their lifestyles as they spend more on consumer goods. This puts brands such as Dior in a sticky position – use celebrities such as Sharon Stone to sell their wares but then muzzle them when they speak out about the conditions in Tibet. In America, Stone would merely be exercising her right to free speech but in China it is seen as meddling in their internal affairs. If Stone feels very strongly about the situation in Tibet why did she sign on as a model for a brand that wanted to use her in Chinese advertising? Money often speaks louder than words…until now that is. Chalk another one up to the bloggers.

May 28, 2008

Red Bull cola…..huuumm…does that sound good?

I had a Red Bull phase. At 3pm I would down an 8 oz can to get thru the end of the day. After 3 weeks my gut was killing me and I couldn’t get any sleep. I was irritable and even my pee changed color. (sorry about the very personal note). However, I am a Red Bull brand fan. The ties into action sports, the entrepreneurial energy of launching their brand, the unconvential marketing all work for me. I must confess, the taste of Red Bull is, well, NASTY. However, the idea of choosing a Red Bull cola over a Coke….REFRESHING!

Kenneth Hein post on BRANDWEEK the week of March 25th all the lovely stats about the state of the cola industry as a whole. Red Bull has been taking a beating as the new market share they have invented, is being gobbled up by energy drink copycat Monster. Since Red Bull is still growing as a whole and has built a brand that has matured enough to safely venture into newer, well established, crowed waters of the cola industry.

Here is why Red Bull can have success, the brand is built on performance and being relevant for this generation. If kids are going to spend money, they want to spend it with in their extend group of piers. Red Bull is closer to home for them. A cola is a cola. I am sure the high end ingredients are the bomb, at then end of the day I hope the waiter at the restaurant are not correcting my order for a Coke by asking do you mean Red Bull cola. I think the lawsuits are the bars over the Red Bull vodka have become silly and frivolus waste of tax payers dollars. I digress.

Red Bull has built the brand from the ground up and the infastructure is there to support a brand extension such as cola. I am excited to see what they do for marketing and how they will WOW the mainstream with their brand. Seems the cola world could use a little waking up! With Coke and Pepsi slipping in sales and parents teaching their kids that colas are bad for them. Lets stay tuned and watch how Red Bull will tackle this market.

Every waking moment we are inundated with brands from all over the globe. We have our brand loyalties but when something new comes along that can offer the same plus more, we tend to find a reason to jump ship. The brands we tout determine the general perception of who we are by the overall population. But that’s what we want, right? After all, when we adopt the mission of each brand, don’t we suddenly become their soldiers in a war for users reiterating the bullet points and three line tags that they have strategically written and milled over in little conference rooms just for the pure objective of speaking directly to us and our demographic? Planning all the right words, the right slang, and just the right length to appeal to the short but detrimental period of time we will absorb this information. Probably the easiest and most obvious for all of us computer dwellers is the MAC, PC rivalry. You are either one or the other. And when the argument arises, both speak with such conviction that one would think it was Gates and Jobs being summoned for that short period of time. Of course we all know MACs are better.

So, the point of all this is really to steer you in the direction of something I found called “Brand Tags: A collective experiment in brand perception.”( www.brandtags.net ) Its an addictive little site that allows you to give a single word or a phrase for a random brand logo that it shows you. You also have the pleasure of seeing what other users have written. A guy by the name of Noah Brier ( www.noahbrier.com ) put this together as a little experiment. I must say I can’t stop. So go ahead and give it a whirl. You just might surprise yourself on what you come up with. 

What do you say, Portlanders? We’ve got some fancy new containers but what are we going to do with all those leftover yellow plastic bins? One container can be used for glass, as everything else gets tossed into the new blue thingy with the wheels, but what about the rest of the yellow containers? Where do THEY go? Being that we are one of the leading green cities of the world, surely we should be able to think of something more creative to do with them then simply tie them together like plastic sausage links and float them across the river to our brothers and sisters in Vancouver, Washington.

So what do YOU think we should do with all the extra yellow bins? Whoever comes up with the best idea should win some sort of new Pampelmoose prize that we invent just for you. Hm. We need a good prize. I don’t know…perhaps…the 563 promo cd’s settling on Dave’s desk right now? Yes…you could recycle them for him! I mean, how long could it possibly take to shred 563 cd’s?

As for me, I vote for building a big yellow Qbert environment in the middle of Pioneer Courthouse Square. Yes…that would be awesome. Now gimme my 563 cd’s!

Posted by Jon Ragel

Well it seemed like a no-brainer, right? Wrong according to Urb Magazine’s blog.

“We didn’t do it together so it ends up being just this weird long song with sort of everybody with lots of their own personalities separate,” Santogold told Gigwise when revealing the track.

Urb says – Maybe it’s the lack of interaction between artists that keeps them from ever even talking about important issues, let alone record songs in an attempt (however vain) to make the world a better place. Or maybe it’s just that with the record industry on it’s ass, musicians have to learn to make due with the money they can earn when they can earn it, leaving less time for charity. Maybe it’s just easier to sellout when facing a ProTools file, rather than your actual peers in a recording studio.
Listen—we love Pharrell, Santogold, The Strokes AND Converse.But if Bob Dylan, Stevie Wonder, Bruce Springsteen, Hall & Oats and two dozen other A-listers could get into an actual recording studio together to make “We Are the World,” couldn’t today’s rockers try just a little bit harder?

Slowly but surely Apple’s iTunes and its accompanying device, Apple TV, are narrowing the gap for me when it comes to TV viewing choices. My cable package with Comcast frustrates me – it’s like the mobile phone provider packages too, you get all locked up with stuff you don’t need, to get access to the stuff you do need. It’s just like walled gardens with the social networks and music services online, it’s a model that has to be broken. And Comcast and other ISP’s need to understand that the end user, their customers, treat Internet access as a utility like electricity so it’s about time that the “one price fits all” model is dismantled too.

With iTunes and Apple TV I can pick and choose the shows I want to watch and I can time-shift, i.e., watch them when I want. If I want to watch all the Deadwood episodes in one weekend marathon I can. And I will own them too and have the ability to watch them anywhere – iPhone, MacBook, iPod.