In the mid-1990s our friend Dave Allen published a zine called “The Clutter of Pop” (followed by a record of the same name). In one of them he wrote an essay about the glut of entertainment media choking our attention spans. I’ve long since lost the zine and I can barely remember Dave’s insights, but I do keep thinking about it in light of the ever increasing glut since its publication.

It is often said that  we only use ten percent of our brains. While that’s not exactly true, we often do only use about ten percent of its capacity at any given time. Another way to look at it is as a giant sieve. When we’re awake and alert, our brains are filtering out a vast majority of the stimuli around us. Don’t check my math, but think of it as only ten percent of the world getting in. Contrast that idea to idea that when we’re asleep and dreaming, the filters are only partially on or completely off. This makes using less of your brain — or stimulating less of it — not only an advantage, but a necessity to your sanity.

As amazing as the human brain is, it still has plenty of limitations. Some of its limitations are what have created the aforementioned glut. We externalize our knowledge and the processing thereof to free up our internal bandwidth. Hieroglyphs, language, books, keyboards, archives, databases, cassette tapes, websites, and iPods are all products of our mental offloading. We’ve emptied our heads so much that now it’s difficult to find a signal among the noise. The digital shift from bits to atoms only exacerbates the issue, problematizing the filtering process in altogether new ways.

For instance, with the impending demise of the printed page the debate regarding digital books is in full swing, following closely after that of the compact disc. Though the nature of reading the printed word and listening to music lend themselves to digitization in very different ways, there is a major overlooked similarity in the transition: The organizing principles of both are being irrevocably reconfigured.

What is a book but an organizing principle? What is an organizing principle but a filtering device? The book works for printed language just as the album does for recorded music: it filters and organizes it in a meaningful way for mental consumption. As David Weinberger pointed out, analog media like books and albums filter first, whereas digital media like websites and MP3s filter last. That is, by the time you read a book it’s been through a thorough rigorous organizing, writing, editing, proofreading, and design process. When you run a search on Google or Wikipedia, what you end up reading is filtered and organized on the fly as you request it (Wikipedia actually has an ongoing organizing process, and Facebook and Twitter are filtering digital information in still new and different ways).

None of this filtering and reorganizing means that the book as we know it is going to go away anytime soon. What all of this means is that some things that were never meant to be books will now have a place to be themselves. Let’s face it, just as some records only have one good song, some books would be better off as blogs.

Time is the one truly finite resource. If we are to optimize it, we need better filters and better organizing principles. Instead of slogging through a whole book on a topic that would’ve just as well made a decent magazine piece, we’ll read it as it develops on the author’s blog. When we want to get lost in some convoluted alternate reality, we can still read a thousand-page Thomas Pynchon novel on good ol’ paper (his newest came out yesterday and is roughly half that long).

These changes change the way we think. They literally change our minds. With more and more choices for our filtering pleasure, I believe it’s mostly for the better.

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

Honda Insight – Let It Shine from Honda on Vimeo.

As Rodger Bridges said today ‘page takeover is the new microsite’ and at least this Honda ad doesn’t break the nav. Click here for the full effect.

The University of Oregon in Portland is showing a free screening of the documentary ‘Copyright Criminals’ and I have been invited to interview the director afterwards. The documentary takes a look at the many hurdles that hip hop artists, DJs and producers have to overcome to use samples of other peoples work in their ostensibly new or reworked versions of classic songs and beats. Those interviewed in the documentary include – Chuck D of Public Enemy, James Brown’s drummer Clyde Stubblefield and co-founder of the Creative Commons Larry Lessig. It also includes performances from Run DMC, The Beastie Boys, Grandmaster Flash and more….

Wednesday April 15 @ 6 PM No Charge and open to the public.
The University of Oregon in Portland
White Stag Block
70 NW Couch St, Portland Oregon

“an amazing documentary on the history of sampling…it kicks
you in the head with how radically the sampler redefined
music…” Blender Magazine

Co-sponsored by the UO Portland Library & Learning Commons and the Portland State University Sociology Club. Promotional considerations by KPSU.

Schooled in Social Networking

Beginning next year, Birmingham City University in the UK will begin offering a one-year course in social media with an emphasis on using social networking sites as communications and marketing tools. Costing over 6,000 U.S. dollars, the program will also teach students how to set up blogs and publish podcasts.

Though the school reports that there has already been significant interest in the course, a few initial thoughts come to mind. First off, many students are already very skilled in social media; is it necessary to dedicate an entire year to the subject when ample resources are available online for free? Secondly, social applications and technology are changing so rapidly that one has to wonder if, by the time the year-long course is up if much of the content will still be relevant…

Stars Love Twitter

Did you know (or care) that Martha Stewart is on Twitter? Currently, she has over 200,000 followers, including Jane Fonda and Michael Phelps. In return, she follows P. Diddy and Snoop Dogg (who refers to Twitter as “twizzle”).

Other famous tweeters include Trent Reznor, Courtney Love, Shaq, Ashton Kutcher, John Mayer, Yoko Ono, Al Gore and Demi Moore.

When celebrities join Twitter, it lends a sense of credibility and authenticity to their brand. And more importantly, they’re generating a constant stream of free publicity with the ability to set the record straight when something unflattering arises.

Fans love tuning in to hear random tidbits from idols’ their daily lives such as when Martha tweeted on March 4th that she had just dined out with Ludacris. According to her, “he loved lunch–esp. the choc cake.”

Of course, there is always a potential downside when a celebrity is allowed to run free with technology away from the watchful eyes of their publicists. Recently, Beyoncé’s little sis Solange Knowles sent out erratic messages to her thousands of followers, only to follow up with a tweet the next day, wondering how she had ended up in the hospital.

Fans prefer the real thing, even when it’s a train wreck in progress. One of Courtney Love’s recent tweets was as dramatic as ever; “THIS MOVE HAS BEEN A TRAGEDY. THIS HOUSE IS CHAOS BEYOND WHAT I COULD HAVE IMAGINED, SOMEONE THREW OUT A HUGELY EXPENSIVE PIECE OF ART!”

While most celebrities compose their own tweets, there’s a handful that hand off the task to their staff, including 50 Cent. His 230,000 followers weren’t impressed when they learned that he has his “web guy” write and post for him. Though, there’s no need to get angry since “the energy of it is all him.” On the temptation of hiring someone else to tweet for him, Shaquille O’Neal nailed the general consensus by saying that “It’s 140 characters. It’s so few characters. If you need a ghostwriter for that, I feel sorry for you.”

If you really can’t get enough of celebrities on Twitter, Celebrity Tweet (complete with the too-obvious tagline “Stalk Celebrities on Twitter!”) provides a real-time feed of their tweets.

Not surprisingly, Twitter really has become a self-induced stalker’s paradise.

[*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…..

Michael Beirut via The NY Times

Celebrated graphic designer Michael Beirut recently opened up to the NY Times about how the world of graphic design has changed over the years.

In 1980 when he started his career as an assistant designer in New York, it was standard to be surrounded by indespensible tools including rubber cement, colored paper, spray glue and X-Acto knives along with other related businesses including typesetters, retouchers and printers.

When change finally did come in the form of personal computers, it happened fast. He says that:

Design work that would have taken me a week in 1980 can now be done on a personal computer in less than an hour. Cutting and pasting, when needed, is done in the basement, often by interns. I get the impression that this kind of work, to which I once applied myself with the pride of a master chef, is now viewed as a chore like dishwashing.

Though Beirut has kept with the times and embraced modern technology along the way, he still wonders if designers haven’t lost something in the process. He feels that performing tasks at such a rapid-fire pace on computers where mistakes can be undone instantaneously has stripped away some of the deliberation and attention to detail.

Unfortunately, things are moving too fast for people to stop and take notice…

From MediaPost:

In the hyper-targeted media world, the sweet spot is often local. To tap that potential, NBC Local Media has launched Neighborhood News Pages, available in nine O&O markets, including seven in the top 10. The sites, which aggregate news from NBC’s local TV affiliates as well as the Web, then organize the information by neighborhood. Topics covered include news, sports, health, around town, weather and traffic.

The local markets represented are: WNBC New York, KNBC Los Angeles, WMAQ Chicago, WCAU Philadelphia, KNTV San Francisco, KXAS Dallas-Ft. Worth, WRC Washington, D.C., KNDS San Diego and KTIS Hartford. The news pages were built and launched by Outside.in, a data and technology platform that creates and distributes hyperlocal news.

“Our new Locals Only sites enable our users to be true insiders and to fulfill on that promise we need to deepen our coverage in local communities,” says Brian Buchwald, senior vice president, local integrated media for NBC. He notes that the NNP allows the network to “add entirely new sections of content to our sites and create more targeted ad impressions at a fraction of the cost.”

“Publishers can use our Neighborhood News Pages to create thousands of discrete, highly targeted local news pages to complement their national and regional coverage,” adds Mark Josephson, CEO of Outside.in. “Outside.in covers all local blogs, mainstream media and twitter streams. If it’s about local, we’ve got it.”

Both national and local ads appear on Neighborhood News Pages. The owned-and-operated sales team sells ads for the sites, in addition to NBC’s national sales team.

Er, cough, cough…

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?

Wired Magazine’s Paul Boutin recently penned an article claiming that blogs are so 2004 and therefore, totally irrelevant. His argument hinges on the assumption that cut-rate journalists, underground marketing teams and stale corporate blogs have flooded out the authentic and fresh voices that once ruled the blogosphere. There’s no denying that it takes a huge amount of dedication and time to craft amazing content. But, he argues that your time is better spent networking on sites like Twitter, Facebook and Flickr.

Boutin notes that a quick scroll through Technorati’s Top 100 finds a list of mostly professional blogs resembling magazines that employ a staff of writers. A single blogger just can’t keep up with these massive sites that sometimes produce dozens of posts in a single day.

The web’s 2008 answer to blogging is supposedly Twitter, the new darling of bloggers everywhere. It operates faster than blogs and can be searched immediately for content (there’s no wait for indexing by Google).

I would argue that while Twitter is a powerful micro-blogging device, it works even better when paired up with a traditional blog. Services like Twitterfeed feed direct links from your new blog posts to legions of Twitter followers every hour and can have a serious impact on traffic. Twitter has a purpose, but a limit of 140 characters per tweet can never replace the content or value of full-length articles.

While Boutin has some fantastic points, I would argue that some bloggers genuinely love what they’re doing and enjoy the sense of community their blogs garner. It’s not all about the fame, getting into the Technorati Top 100 list, or even earning a healthy living from ad dollars. If you’re truly passionate about blogging, you’ll stick it out through the rough patches, inconsistent traffic and hecklers. Facebook, Twitter and Flickr, while great for sharing content and networking, just can’t fully replicate the blogging experience.

My friend Jonathan Spalter, chairman of the Mobile Future Coalition and CEO of Public Insight, served as chief information officer at the United States Information Agency during the Clinton administration and has written an insightful op-ed piece for the San Jose Mercury News about Obama and that BlackBerry that may have to go to the tech bins at Goodwill.

“As President-elect Barack Obama prepares to take power, sadly one of his first acts as president may be to power down his beloved BlackBerry smart-phone. Why must the leader of the country that created the Internet, e-mail and various other advancements, be forced to forgo modern technology?
The primary concern cited is the Presidential Records Act, which requires all presidential documents to be put in the official record. This is a worthy goal to be sure, and Obama, who was widely acknowledged as one of the most technologically savvy candidates during the campaign, has been an advocate for governmental accountability, transparency, accessibility and efficiency. Still, the strictures of this act should not deprive our president — or our nation — of the benefits of his BlackBerry, to which he has been joined at the hip.

While the president is required to furnish to the national archives logs of telephone calls, and copies of all correspondence and papers, electronic and otherwise, our nation’s archivists have no need for concern that smart-phones can circumvent these rules. BlackBerry One would be fully compliant, as all phone logs and text and e-mail messages can easily be saved on government servers.

Discretion required

The trickier issue has to do with the security of the president’s cell phone. Hackers have listened in on cell phone conversations and downloaded smart-phone data. For situations when the president needs to discuss sensitive or classified matters, mobile and wireless engineers and the U.S. intelligence agencies have designed and deployed ingenious encryption algorithms for use on dedicated mobile platforms for his use. When it comes to his everyday use of his personal smart-phone though, the president, like the rest of us, simply will need to exercise good judgment and discretion about what he says and what he sends.

Obama’s effective use of technology platforms like the smart-phone is important for other reasons. He plays a vital role as a champion of progress and innovation. What signal would it send to international technology markets, and our own citizens, that the U.S. president is “off the grid?” The Pew Internet and American Life Project recently established that Hispanics and African-Americans are driving data usage on mobile phones and using wireless handsets as portable personal computers. It is ironic that Obama would promote policies increasing access to mobile technologies, but personally would be restricted in their use.

YouTube president

This is not the first time that our nation’s presidents have had to contend with an often technophobic culture in the federal government. In 1877, President Rutherford B. Hayes, despite strong misgivings from the White House telegraph office, installed the first telephone. The Clinton White House prevailed in a debate with the State Department allowing him to e-mail birthday greetings to the president of South Korea, rather than using snail mail.

President-elect Obama’s team has already initiated a march to technological progress — his weekly “radio” addresses to Americans have also broadcast on YouTube. Obama will also be the first president with a laptop on his Oval Office desk. By firmly embracing technologies like the smart-phone to engage people around the world, more efficiently manage his administration, and even occasionally check Chicago White Sox box scores, Obama will advocate a new era of transparency and innovation in American governance.”

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.

DataPortability – Join The Conversation from Smashcut on Vimeo.

Found on thewebissocial.com

Jerry Yang has decided to give up the reins at Yahoo! as soon as a new CEO can be found. Story.

When Barack Obama becomes president in about two months, he will be expected to give up his trusty BlackBerry, which has been securely fastened to his belt for years. There are a multitude of reasons why he will have to surrender his portable email device including security concerns, the Presidential Records Act (all correspondence is fair game for public viewing) and the looming threat of subpoenas.

To balance out the depravation of some technologies, Obama plans to be the first U.S. president to have a laptop on his Oval Office desk.

Though some have argued that Obama might be able to break the rules and retain email access, Diana Owen disagrees. “They could come up with some bulletproof way of protecting his e-mail and digital correspondence, but anything can be hacked,” she said. “The nature of the president’s job is that others can use e-mail for him.”

While gaining many privileges, Obama will have function without a few of life’s little conveniences in return.

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.

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.

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.

Simple user interface, giant database of videos, easy search that works…and all built on the back of free content handed to them by the recording industry. Ha!

MTV Music

Move over, iPhone. The Google phone has arrived. T-Mobile has partnered with Google to launch the G1, which is the first phone to feature Google’s Android software. As you may have guessed, Android makes the phone function very similarly to the iPhone.

Like the iPhone online store, the Android Market is full of free applications and widgets developed by programmers around the world. A big difference between Google and Apple though is that Google will allow open submissions to its store instead of turning away programs it deems inconsistent with its mission.

Critics cite the G1’s biggest improvement over the iPhone as being the Menu button that pulls up a panel of large buttons of functions that relate to what you’re doing. For PC fanatics, it’s the equivalent of a right-click button on a computer mouse.

As would be expected with version 1.0 of this phone, there are many small glitches, but these are expected to be ironed out quickly. Some bright points though are picture messaging, voice dialing and the option to turn any song into a ringtone. Additionally, as a Sidekick phone, the screen pops open with a small keyboard underneath.

Though the G1 isn’t as streamlined or beautiful as the iPhone, soon enough Androids will expand into a variety of formats and networks. Finally, adopters looking for an iPhone alternative have some viable options.

Business Week has posted a slide show offering up its list of the 25 Most Influential People on The Web and it’s a pretty good list too. Of course, any list that includes Jon Stewart and The Daily Show, which has become the place where many claim to be getting their best coverage of the elections, would get my vote….

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’m not sure that this is quite the news we’ve been waiting for but News Corp, owners of MySpace, have announced that users on MySpaceTV can now directly upload their videos, or rather upload a video of themselves in front of the web cam, by hitting a record button. It’s as simple as going to the ‘Upload a Video’ link, fill out the video description and then hit ‘Record a Video.’ The world will now be a better place.

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.

Over the last several years, blogging has grown from a casual hobby to a full-blown phenomenon. The Blog World Expo was created to assist and educate the increasing number of bloggers and will be hosted in Las Vegas from September 19th through the 22nd, 2008. This convention is unique in that it is the only industry-wide tradeshow, conference and media event dedicated to blogging and new media. Included in the expo are over 50 seminars and panel discussions that aid bloggers in becoming more prolific and successful within their niches.

According to Blog World’s stats:

* Over 12 million American adults maintain blogs (and more than 57 million read them).

* 22 of the world’s 100 most popular websites are blogs.

* There are over 1.4 million new blog posts every day.

* 1.7 million American adults list making money as one of the reasons they blog.

* Over 120,000 new blogs are created every day.

Besides providing a stable platform for individuals and companies to express their views, promote products and connect with the public, blogs are ripe with social networking opportunities. According to Synovate, though more than half of adults in 17 countries don’t know what social networking is, it’s blazing along in the U.S. with an expected participation rate of nealy 45% of internet users by the end of 2008.

Wikipedia claims that “The modern blog evolved from the online diary, where people would keep a running account of their personal lives. Most such writers called themselves diarists, journalists, or journalers.” Early incarnations of the blog were usually integrated into personal websites and coded by hand. The popularity of blogging quickly spread in the late 90s when hosted blog tools like Open Diary, Live Journal and Blogger began offering free, user-friendly services.

Now, many bloggers use blog software that they have installed on their personal domains since they can more closely control the customization, track stats and monetary opportunities. Popular software options include Wordpress, Moveable Type, Textpattern and Drupal.

The future of blogging is bright: 89% of companies surveyed say that they think blogs will be more important in the next five years. Companies are seeing the potential in running blogs now more than ever before because they give fans and consumers a way to connect directly with the products and services they love. And, individuals are capitalizing on blogging as well. Some are now earning enough advertising and sponsorship dollars to blog full-time.

In only ten years’ time, blogging has revolutionized the way we get our news, network with like-minded individuals, gather product information and share our views. It’s pretty amazing when you think about it…

How has blogging impacted your life?

The feed reader was packed this morning with the buzz about Google’s new open source web browser, Chrome. Or rather the comic book about it, written and drawn by Scott McCloud. From the Google source – The browser will include a JavaScript Virtual Machine called V8, built from scratch by a team in Denmark, and open-sourced as well so other browsers could include it. One aim of V8 was to speed up JavaScript performance in the browser, as it’s such an important component on the web today. Google also say they’re using a “multi-process design” which they say means “a bit more memory up front” but over time also “less memory bloat.” When web pages or plug-ins do use a lot of memory, you can spot them in Chrome’s task manager, “placing blame where blame belongs.”

Found on Twitter via @MarshallK – Link to story on ReadWriteWeb

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.

Here at Nemo, we swear by Wordpress, a state-of-the-art blogging platform that encompasses thousands of free themes and plugins to customize your experience. Wordpress was founded in 2003 and since then, it has grown to be the largest self-hosted blogging device in the world.

If you decide to use Wordrpess, you’re in great company. Well-known users of the platform include The New York Times, Ford, People Magazine, Delta Airlines, The Wall Street Journal, Time Magazine, BoingBoing and Xerox.

Some benefits of the Wordpress platform:

1. The install is fairly quick and painless. Simply download the newest version of the platform here and follow the detailed install guide.

2. There are over 2,000 free plugins available from the Wordpress site that allow you to customize your experience down to spam filters and comment formats.

3. The admin panel in Wordpress is web-based; as long as you have an internet connection, it’s possible to update from anywhere in the world.

The beauty of Wordpress is that it’s an open source project; hundreds of people around the world are constantly working to make it more efficient and it’s totally free to use. Nearly 200 themes can be viewed directly on the Wordpress site. Additionally, some of the best, most professinal looking themes out there include:

1. Modicus Theme:

2. Futurosity Theme:

3. The Morning After Theme:

4. Overstand Theme:

5. Fontella Theme:

6. Modicus Remix Theme:



Are you a WordPress user? What are some of benefits that you’ve gained from using this platform?

Ma.gnolia announces upgrades to its social bookmarking service.

Why M2?
The decision to re-build Ma.gnolia arises from trying to solve a number of problems faced by the current
design, and the desire to continue evolving Ma.gnolia’s features and technology:

• The current architecture requires considerable effort to maintain the large volumes of activity and data
that customers bring to Ma.gnolia. Keeping up with this growth, exploring interesting new technolo-
gies like OpenID and OAUTH, mitigating the effects of illegitimate use of the service, have come at the
expense of delaying other plans, such as the introduction of pro-level services.

• A single service cannot be all things to all people. Feature requests come in faster than we can make
changes. Moreover, requests are sometimes mutually exclusive, and can be at odds with the values be-
hind Ma.gnolia and its wider community of customers.

• Some of the core technologies used to build Ma.gnolia, such as Ruby on Rails, have matured in both
quality and best practices. While updates and refactoring of the existing codebase could help, those ap-
proaches won’t be as effective as a ground-up re-write.

• Although existing API approaches are well-received, the current architecture is not suited to the emerging direction of modern web services, exemplified by technologies like Google’s OpenSocial and Facebook’s F8.

• A major re-design is required to truly take advantage of lessons learned over 3 years. These issues range across identity, reputation, spam, privacy and contact management, cross-service presence, operational costs and the personal and organizational goals that customers bring to a social bookmarking service.

And the important news for existing users is -

• A free, ad-supported Ma.gnolia will continue to be available for private individuals, as it is now. Existing accounts, with all settings and content will migrate to M2 with no action required by members.
• The ability to download and manage one’s own Ma.gnolia installation, completely public or limited to
select members.
• Business and organizations can subscribe to enhanced features and custom services.

Using the Beijing Olympics as a showcase, the big names in the sneaker world including Nike, Adidas, Puma, Asics and Reebok have developed dozens of new designs to debut with the hopes of hooking the rapidly expanding Chinese middle class (along with legions of ’sneaker freaks’ worldwide) on their offerings.

Strategy-wise, these leading brands are focusing on creating shoes for sports that are popular in Asia like badminton, rowing, fencing and a style of martial arts known as washu. Extra style points are being dished out to Nike’s new equestrian boot that’s bound to leap from the world of horseback riding and onto the street:

Nike’s new basketball shoe (above) is crafted in the trademark Chinese red and yellow and uses a system called flywire to replace thick materials while creating a sort of bridge suspension to hold the foot in place.

The technology in these newly developed offerings are truly groundbreaking and though the stylings are a bit futuristic at first glance, they’re sure to resonate with a wide variety of Olymics sports fans.

Whereas devotees of fashion once staked out the newsstands to get their latest fix of the freshest magazines, a new movement has been rapidly gaining momentum over the last few years. Online publications designed to imitate their glossy counterparts are popping up and now receiving hundreds of thousands of visitors each month.

While fashion folks are still faithful to their printed publications, the ease and low cost of constantly updating an online version with fresh content in our blog obsessed, 24/7 society has become increasingly important. Additionally, now that many consider social networking to be a cornerstone of human interaction, most of the newer online magazines have the added advantage of allowing people to comment on articles and connect in forums. The letter to the editor page that traditional magazines employ at the beginning of each issue now seems stale in comparison.

Online magazines are now trying to draw a line in the sand between themselves and blogs by focusing on premium photography, full length articles, and high end fashion with information and direct links to the designers.

The traditional magazines have always done a fantastic job of offering many of the quality elements that their online counterparts are now just perfecting such as beautifully photographed spreads and in-demand designer items. But, now that they’ve caught up in their appearance and offerings, major advertising revenue is coming into play. And, many companies love the prospect of advertising within an online publication because the rates are often less than half of the cost to grace the pages of traditional glossies (which can run $60,000 to $100,000 for a single page).

As online publications continur to raise the bar on quality and gain more advertising dollars in the process, the mainstays of the print world will have to tighten their budgets. After all, they are the ones that have to worry about rent, the cost of paper and printing, employing a roster of regular staff members and delivering the magazines to newsstands every month.

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.

I was reading a report today from ComScore Media Metrix about how American and European mobile users are accessing maps from their mobile devices. No surprise that the iPhone is the leading device in the USA with the Nokia N95 and N70 leading the way in Europe. More interesting was the data on Mode of Transport Intended to be Used when Accessing Maps. As you’ll see in the grid below USA mobile users lead the way in use whilst driving in the car, come last in using their devices whilst traveling on public transport and last again in use whilst working out. Whatever the data means it does point to the fact that we drive more and use public transport less than our European counterparts. Or perhaps it’s a demographic issue?

AdWeek reports that “Federated Media Publishing, the blog-centric ad network helmed by Industry Standard founder John Battelle, has partnered with Microsoft to launch CrowdFire, a music-themed social media platform where fans can share and consume videos, photos and personal accounts from live concerts.”

Reading the story and then digging through the CrowdFire site I can’t help but feel that this is just yet-another-social-network. The site is clean enough and easy to navigate but seems a bit jargon-heavy as in the use of the word crowdsource. And Battelle comes over as oddly quaint when he says that the idea for CrowdFire was sparked when he attended several recent music festivals, and saw how prominent cell phone cameras and other portable video recording devices have become. That sounds so 2000 to me….

HCSC Photo Workshop -Day 3- Tim Zimmerman from Dave Allen on Vimeo.

The HCSC campers woke to Mother Nature playing a game with the weather. The mountain was socked in. While they waited for the clouds to lift, Tim Zimmerman instructed the class all about digital workflow, processing and storage. The clouds lifted on High Cascade and we hit the snow. Molly Aguirre, Hanna Teter, Jeremy Jones all hucked for the workshop shooters.

My good friend Brian Zisk, the man behind the always interesting SanFranMusicTech Conference, has announced the next gathering. It will be back at San Francisco’s Hotel Kabuki on October 20th. There are early bird tickets currently available through August 8th which you can grab here. I will be there as a panelist along with the following folks:

Bob Heyman – Mediasmith, Chief Search Officer
Steve Jang – imeem, CMO & Head of Business Development
Ethan Kaplan – Warner Music Technology, VP
Rachel Masters – Ning, VP of Strategic Relationships
Jack Moffit – Speeqe, CEO / Chesspark, CEO & Lead Developer / IceCast Streaming Media Server, Creator / Xiph Foundation, Co-Founder
Sean O’Connell – Music Allies, Founder & CEO
Dave Ulmer – Motorola, Sr. Director Multimedia Products and Services
Carnet William – Sprout, Co-Founder & CEO
Brian Zisk – SanFran MusicTech Summit, Executive Producer / Future of Music Coalition, Technologies Director

Photo courtesy Thor Swift/Wired.com

Found on the Wired blogs. Google’s Udi Manber spends endless time thinking about how search can be improved. One big reason many searches don’t succeed, he believes, is that despite the 20 billion or so Web pages in Google’s indexes — including the 2 million items in Wikipedia — the information simply isn’t there.

“The process will take 20 seconds with credit cards,” says Knol product manager Cedric Dupont. Phone checks will take a minute or so. This vetting, Manber hopes, will give knols accountability and, in the case of high-status authors, the benefit of a solid reputation.

Update: Here’s Knol from Google.

The folks from Tumblr left a post on Social Media Today about an overhaul to the Tumblr platform.

In their own words – We’re getting ready to push some major updates over the next few weeks, and we wanted to give you a heads-up on changes to our custom theme engine. We’ve tried to make Tumblr themes as open and customizable as possible, and the things you’ve created have blown our minds. But there are still things we’ve wanted to do that haven’t been easy enough.

So next Monday we’ll be scrapping our old code for a completely overhauled template engine. We’re seriously excited about this, and we can’t wait to see what you’re able to do with it.

The most noticeable improvements:

* The new engine is scoped, so you’ll be able to nest and repeat blocks and variables.
* The engine uses a new token parser that will support special syntax for API hooks.

This will let your theme call back for content, like:

{​block:Posts type=”photo” tagged=”spotlight” count=”5″}
” />
{/block:Posts}

We’ve been systematically testing the new engine to make sure it’s backwards compatible. You can test it yourself by adding ?beta=1 to any tumblelog URL [e.g. http://www.davidslog.com/?beta=1]. If it’s working correctly, you shouldn’t see a difference.

Please let us know if you see anything funny.

Incidentally I have tested the clunky old Social Space Station theme and it seems to be identical so that’s good. Still waiting on a banner to take the design to a new universe. The Social Space Station is a tumblelog dedicated to presenting, discussing, and discovering interesting things out there in the social media sphere.

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.

My Online Marketing Presentation About Radiohead from iaintait on Vimeo.

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?

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.

As we celebrate Independence Day we can mull this over. Regardless of the facts of the case and Viacom’s complaint it would seem that, as the NYT reports, “the order raised concerns among users and privacy advocates that the online video viewing habits of hundreds of millions of people could be exposed.”

Via the New York Times:
A federal judge in New York has ordered Google to turn over to Viacom a database linking users of YouTube, the Web’s largest video site by far, with every clip they have watched there.

For every video on YouTube, the judge required Google to turn over to Viacom the login name of every user who watched it, and the address of their computer, known as an I.P., or Internet protocol, address. Both companies have argued that such data cannot be used to unmask the identities of individual users with certainty. But in many cases, technology experts and others have been able to link I.P. addresses to individuals using records of their online activities.

Here’s the back story on the lawsuit from FindLaw:

Viacom and its companies filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against YouTube and Google seeking at least $1 billion in damages.

The media company charges that “YouTube has harnessed technology to willfully infringe copyrights on a huge scale,” by taking “the value of creative content on a massive scale for YouTube’s benefit without payment or license. The suit alleges that the copyright infringement is on such a large scale that it “identified more than 150,000 unauthorized clips of their copyrighted programming on YouTube that had been viewed an astounding 1.5 billion times.”

Viacom details the “legitimate licensed channels” that it works with to distribute the company’s copyright-protected content. These partners include Apple’s iTunes Music Store and Joost.

The suit also charges that YouTube selectively deploys filtering technology “[b]y limiting copyright protection to business partners who have agreed to grant it licenses,” even though copyright holders are entitled to protection of their works under federal copyright law without such business agreements.

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.

I find it interesting that David Pogue, the editor of the New York Times’ Personal Tech column has a problem with the idea of free when it comes to promotion online.

He quotes Kevin Kelly – “David, my guess is that rather than seeing an immediate, or even delayed dip in your books sales, that the pirated PDF either made no difference to your sales, or it actually elevated them. Just as ‘free’ radio drives CD and album sales.” A sensible attitude I say. I reference Kevin Kelly in a recent post here.

Pogue also needs to follow Chris Anderson’s Long Tail blog for more on his upcoming book, ‘Free.’

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

I’ll never break my Mac habit to go for a Zune but if there ever was a reason to own one this may be it. Limited edition release of 500 units engraved with the Joy Division iconic artwork created by Peter Saville. Get your finger on the trigger on June 17th.

Can’t get enough sun during your day? Try storing some for later…. From Suck.UK

“Ahh well, I wouldn’t be needing this notebook for long anyways… Stay tuned for more…”

Nemo client HP and subsidiary Voodoo PC have been working feverishly on a little project. The way these things go, we can’t say anymore than that… suffice to say, keep your eyes open. Things should be getting pretty HOT (a little forshadowing here) for Voodoo in the not too distant future. Check back on the 5th for more insight.

www.rahulsood.com

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. 

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.

It’s not that I don’t trust you. Wait. I guess it is that I don’t trust you. Nothing personal—I just don’t want you thieving my card’s number and using it down at Radio Shack so I covered the last four digits with a White Cheddar Cheez-It. Call me paranoid, I guess. Meanwhile, if you’re even more of a procrastinator than I am you’ll be needing to go get one of these pronto!

My first thoughts of Digital TV all involve March Madness. Could CBS make it so that we could switch from game to game without having to buy some fancy cable package or having our TV screen split into four teeny sections? Yes. I bet they could. But given the fact that CBS seems to be programmed for people roughly the age of 79 I doubt they’ll be doing anything hasty.

Digital TV Coupon: Don’t leave 2008 without it.

post by Jon Ragel

Grand Theft Auto IV sold 6 million copies in its first week at $60 a pop in the USA. Globally it brought in $500 million. That outstrips all of the first weeks music CD sales from top artists since 1991. Here’s the top 5 list of those week one sales in units not dollars:

1. ‘N Sync – No Strings Attached – 2.4 million
2. ‘N Sync – Celebrity – 1.9 million
3. Eminem – The Marshall Mathers LP – 1.8 million
4. Backstreet Boys – Black and Blue – 1.6 million
5. Britney Spears – Oops….I Did It Again – 1.3 million

On April 29th one day sales for Grand Theft Auto IV were 3.6 million copies. Now, let’s hear it from all those folks who say that internet file sharing is killing music sales….

Here’s one of those moments where modern culture and history collide very nicely. The modern part being the simple viral nature of YouTube, an email from my friend Maf who is traveling around his birthplace, Wales and the old Llanfrynach Church organ. And like anything to do with UK history it comes with a simple tale. This one is about gaining access to the church – “Here’s a little video of the old pump organ in the church next door to my Brothers house in Cowbridge, Wales, UK (yes near England). To get into the Church you must got to the pub across the road and ask at the bar for the key. It feels impolite to ask for the key without getting a drink. I think a lot of people may be drunk when they visit the Church… awesome.”

Find more at Maf and Tara’s blog.

From Jakob Lodwick

This is what Dane will do for Nemo and our clients:

Flex / Flash Development with ActionScript 2 / 3. Standards Compliant Web Development – XHTML + CSS + AJAX. Server-side Web Development – C# / VB.NET, PHP, JSP, Ruby, Python. Relational Database Design and Implementation. Project specification, prototyping, and information architecture. Application Development C++ / C#

He will also do the following:

Write technical specifications & functional documentation. Recommend hosting, encryption packages, payment gateways and any other technical platforms that a project or client may need. Manage the technical side of a project to ensure accuracy to the project plan, the right use of our code library, and ensuring that the code…..oh never mind.

So, good luck with all that Dane….

Dane joins Nemo from Struck Creative where he helped get the Portland office off the ground and was a Lead Interactive Developer. Prior to that he spent 2 years at the Overland Agency as a Software Engineer and Lead Flash Developer. Before joining Overland he was a freelance Interactive Designer and Developer.

From 1999 – 2003 Dane skipped college to travel in Zimbabwe as a motorcycle repair dude. A photoshopped picture of Dane sporting fake dreadlocks will appear here soon. Dane lives in the Pearl with his better half the famous and lovely Kiala Kazebee.

I use my Facebook page to stay in touch with hundreds of people every day and during the course of those days I post a lot of interesting content that is not available for search by all the usual suspects – Yahoo! Google etc. Not to mention that our Nemo Design Facebook Group can’t be searched either. All because Facebook is a hold out in endorsing the OpenSocial initiative.
Google, Yahoo, and News Corp.’s MySpace.com announced in March that they have formed the OpenSocial Foundation, a nonprofit group to support the OpenSocial initiative that Google kick-started last year to promote a universal standard for developer applications on social-networking sites. Google has focused efforts on creating code, such as the open source OpenSocial APIs and the Social Graph API, to make social data more portable and accessible to applications. Just in case you were worried that all those heavy hitters might have too much control OpenSocial is now managed by an independent organization.
OpenSocial is basically a set of common APIs that application developers can use to create applications that work on any social networks (called “hosts”) that choose to participate.

“As the largest contributor to the memecached system, Facebook has long been a leader and supporter of open source initiatives but will not join the foundation,” a statement from the company read. “The company will continue to evaluate partnership opportunities that will benefit the 300,000 Facebook Platform developers while improving the Facebook user experience.”

So Yahoo! and Google’s search engines are shut out which is a drag.

Google held an event last month to pull together executives from companies such as Hewlett-Packard, Pepsi and General Mills and try and persuade them to run advertising on YouTube. Google’s challenge is to teach these executives that YouTube is more than just a site for users to upload goofy video clips, it’s actually more of a social network activity site. As Google executives pointed out using YouTube is more engaging than watching television as there is much more interactivity. And one of Google’s execs, Dave Eun said that “he thought advertisers were far too focused on well-known television brands, and that some of the best video comes from smaller outlets like the Sundance Channel and the Professional Bull Riders Association.” Google is also trying to get the industry to set standards for online videos, on the assumption that standards will help advertisers spend more on video ads.

Ever wonder where A Tribe Called Quest got their cool samples or you could swear “hey, I know that song” when you here someone else’s song? Well now you can find out with The History of Sampling.

“Each square represents an album, with sampled artists on the lower half and sampling artists on the upper half. Albums are placed horizontally according to release date, while vertical placement reflects the number of samples on that album. The middle resprents the area of most sampling, so commonly sampled albums are closer to the side with the sampling albums, and vice versa. The rectangles that appear to the right of a selected album represent the individual songs. Songs with taller rectangles have a higher sample count.”

4 Hero and J Dilla – Over The Breaks

Nate, friend of Nemo, went out to play with Microsoft’s new Surface interface. There’s more info here at the Surface blog.

What would a music video look like if it were purely directed by the music? Not driven by a concept, nor by a desire to build an image, but purely as an expression of a great song? Designer Jakob Trollback shares the results of his experiment in the form. The song is “Moonlight in Glory,” from David Byrne and Brian Eno’s classic album My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, remastered in 2006. Jakob Trollback is a designer and creative thinker and he’s also a DJ. His company is Trollback + Company. From the TED Conference 2008

Cool stuff in the mail at Nemo today – that box pictured above. What I’d call the best business card yet, an audiobox from Jason Edwards at Newcrackle. Jason offers up sound design, foley and adr plus broadcast mixing. All your sound production needs in other words.

As Facebook continues to become more and more ubiquitous as the social networking tool of the chattering classes it has become obvious to heavy users of FB [me included] that the site needs to give us all not some of the tools to make the experience a one-stop-shop for communicating with both friends, co-workers and business clients. Today Six Apart launched a Facebook application that brings us one step closer to that goal.

Blog It by Typepad for Facebook – Blog It is a free Facebook application which focuses on making it easier for you to create content no matter the blogging platform you use. Blog It brings some of the best social aspects of Facebook to blogging, making it easy for you to let your friends and colleagues around the web know what you’re up to and what you’re writing.

Thanks to Marshall Kirkpatrick at Read Write Web for the news.

I signed up for Dopplr recently. Here’s the blurb from their ‘About’ page.

Dopplr lets you share your future travel plans privately with friends and colleagues. The service then highlights coincidence, for example, telling you that three people you know will be in Paris when you will be there too. You can use Dopplr on your personal computer and mobile phone. It links with online calendars and social networks.

The service has attracted a following among business travellers around the globe. Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia recently named Dopplr his “favorite non-wiki website” in The New York Times Sunday Magazine: “You put in your travel schedule and link to your friends. It allows you to see where everyone is. I love it.”

Their blog will keep you updated with their updates. An iCal/Google calendar feature looks quite handy.

DROPCLOCK is an aesthetically intriguing motion clock screensaver. Every minute of real time is numerically expressed with heavy helvetica dropping into water in super slow-motion.

Pop star/rapper, Daft Punk masher, Kanye West will be your pilot today. Well ok not really but if you want to “Fly away with Kanye!” as his web site proclaims then you can. The rappers company, West Brands, has struck a deal with Travelocity to offer online travel services via KanyeTravel.com.

Sometimes things are just in the air. And sometimes those things are nerdy. This week is one of those times. On the heels of reading this article just published on A List Apart – Findability, Orphan of the Web Design Industry, I was forwarded an article about a large local Portland agency adding a Director of Search. Later in the week, I sat in a conference room going over marketing requirements for a client, near the top of the list was “SEO strategy”. This got me thinking again about why we in the industry do the things we do and who we’re doing them for. (Really, I’m the life of the party) Looking at the sort of prototypical web application, something like Wikipedia, the mechanics and reasoning of search are obvious: we’re searching for a specific piece of information, we find an entry on it, we’re happy. For those of us who work in marketing though, the reasoning can become muddled.One of the things that makes interactive attractive to our clients is that it’s very easy to define and retrieve success metrics. If we launch a digital media campaign, it’s nice to be able to tell our client that the banners we made got a .8% click through. We can show charts of drop-off points. And of course – we can show search results. But what do all these things really mean? It shows that people are seeing the message, but says nothing to what they think of it. And even when we can infer some type of opinion, what they don’t show is what the viewer wanted and didn’t find. Our goal is to craft a message, and then try to get as many people as possible to view that message. It’s TV, with craftier Nielsens.

But by viewing the web as a channel, like TV or radio, we’re missing one of the things that is fundamentally great about the web: its a conversation between our clients and their customers. It’s the first and best chance to help our clients create the sort of relationship dynamic that converts the curious into customers and makes customers fanatics. If all we’re doing is helping people find our one way broadcast message, then aren’t we really just finding new and creative ways to say and do the same old thing? On the other hand, if we change the goal from getting our viewers to listen to our client’s pitch to providing viewers with a meaningful experience, and if we start making our clients a part of the communities they’re selling to, then it becomes necessary to expand our conversation from the tactical methodologies of SEO into the more holistic notion known as find-ability.What’s the difference?

If you go and read the article on A List Apart (and you should, but then come right back) you’ll see that there are many things, both technical and non-technical, that go into making a site find-able.What really makes the notion of find-ablity stand out for me though is that at its core, it requires us to consider the relative value of our interactive projects through the lens of the user rather than ourselves or our clients. It makes us ask the question: Are we simply trying to get people to the site from a Google search? Or are we trying to help them find the content and experiences within our site that are meaningful to them? It asks us to look at our sites as more than one monolithic exercise in marketing and instead see it as a collection of content that in some way benefits the user. It transforms the notion of SEO from a metric to a service. It changes the way we look at content, from being something that we create that is consumed by the viewer into something that reacts to the community that views it, that is portable and contextual. We stop writing the narrative and realize that the brand is the vessel into which the community pours its own experiences. At its foundation, the notion of find-ability is far less about technology, and more about a genuine empathy for the people who use our products.

One to bookmark. Modern English coming soon.

Adobe Photoshop Express has arrived. It’s currently in beta but I’m going to give it a test drive. I’m intrigued about the ability that lets users group images into Web albums and then post them to popular social networking sites. More here.

Are You Taking Advantage of Web 2.0?

David Pogue argues that Web 2.0 offers a direct, more trusted line of communications than anything that came before it.