Portable social graphs – I found this slideshow from razorfish

Nice summary, want to get together and brainstorm some implementations, razorfish?

(slideshow after the jump)

Meta-local: Obnoxious term coined here first.

When the internet is mapped in large detail, micro-genres become a kind of meta-local place where a small audience from disperse geographic locations gather in a tight meta-local space. When these meta-local neighborhoods are well mapped in a network, the hyper-local media can capitalize on the scattered but well-defined niche markets.

In searching for Meta-local groups, using keywords is like looking for the insects in this picture, when it’s much easier to just look for the birds in this swarm.

For example, what do these “micro-genres” look like?
“people who love music with a warble falsetto voice”
“people who love news articles about lost kittens”

These categories sound arbitrary, and too esoteric to bother thinking about, but you’d be surprised what categories people cluster around. For example, who could have guessed that a webcam watching puppies would have an instant audience in the millions?

An A.I. network map algorithm can find niches like just by looking at clusters of traffic. BUT if we rely on keywords, we will never find the meta-local groups that we would never think to look for.

The passtime of listening to music… and ads.

I was recording some notes today on a free voice recording web-app.  Off to the side, I saw an ad for a youtube video with the title “why is healthcare so expensive?” I clicked on it.  Why?  Partly because I was fascinated by the idea of ads on a web-app like a voice recorder – in particular such an irrelevant ad; what does healthcare have to do with voice recorders – nothing.  But I also clicked on it, because I thought a youtube video about healthcare might be informative.  I was right – it was – and entertaining too.  Im sure it’s trying to sell me something at the end of the day – but hey, I was entertained, and informed.  I can’t complain.  It was time as well spent as my time listening to music. – It’s like how people feel about the ads on the superbowl.

The divide between ads and content is dissolving.  Ads are becoming a media of their own.  Media will become ads in that they will link to other pieces of media.

So, The question “how will free media monetize itself?” is misleading.  When you think of media as one big network of partnerships and links – all roads lead to monetizing eventually.

There are three keys to this:

1: Make ads relevant and entertaining.

2: dont let ads disrupt the media-browsing process.  Let the ads be media players.  Let media players advertisers their favorite brands.

3: Most importantly: Let media link to ads THEY LIKE.  The endorsement has to be meaningful.

When this happens, advertising will not be about “selling out” or “inconvenience” – there will just be one process of media exploration.

Preference is the new Search

I never published this, cause it’s kind of a stupid post.  It’s stupid to pretend like preference and personalization are different things.  I’m too lazy to clean it up to make it better.  But here it is anyway, if you’re bored and are interesting in preference/personalization.  Plus i do actually think that preference is the new search

No Way – a music album by ThinkSketch

Listen to "No Way" by ThinkSketch

To try out ReverbNation I made an album.  It will be available everywhere soon (itunes, amazon, etc).  But no one will look there anyway.   Get it here, and on facebook, soon on LaLa I hope, and everywhere else I can find as I get familiar with how this “making an album” thing works.

Reverbnation – Why facebook will eat iTunes

The music industry as we know it is collapsing.  Lots of money will be lost, but the musicians themselves won’t lose money.  In fact, they will do better in the new music economy.  What is happening?  The internet has brought change to music, and it’s not just a new sound.  The entire philosophy of music is changing.  (See below for details*)

The flood gates will open when musicians realize that they don’t need labels anymore.  They will run their business with online tools like reverbnation.  Reverbnation is a full solution for artists to distribute their music, plan tours and sell merchandise.  In their own words – “ReverbNation is revolutionizing the music ecosystem by bringing together artists, fans, venues, and record labels to forge relationships around the music that sustains us.”

Here is reverbnation’s control room interface.  To explore it, I signed up as an artist (“ThinkSketch,” of course) and started using it.  It feels great and they’ve covered all the territory that I’ve been talking about for months.  Including letting fans promote and invest in your music and planning your music tour.  Musicians will run their promotion campaigns through facebook, you tube, twitter, and whatever else new comes along. They will promote on the city streets by hiring local friends in cities along their tours to post fliers for them.

*

At the core, the philosophy of music is the same as it ever was – sharing our favorite new discoveries with our friends.  But suddenly “friends” no longer means people you know, and “discovery” no longer means digging through piles of records, (or even lists of mp3s).  Now “friends” means a scatter plotted demographic across the globe who have any number of micro-genre related connections to you.  And “discovery” means subscribing to any number of complicated algorithms that will study your detailed listening whims and will feed you endlessly new sounds as long as you can bear to listen.

Artists and fans see the light.  And they are itching to explore all the new promising possibilities that this brave new world has to offer.  On the other hand the music labels are scared shit-less and are doing everything they can to hold back the flood waters.  The music industry today is a mess of legal battles and young startups pushing on the crumbling wall.

News reports of apple and sony doing away with DRM protection are only the latest signs that this wall is crumbling.  But the change won’t come from the top.  The pressure from this change is caused by the artists and fans, and they are the ones who will make the change happen -

New Years Fail -> Success!

My new years resolution this year was to fail at my first web startup.  You might think the resolution should be to succeed -But I’ve heard many times that I’m more than likely to fail a few times before I get it right, so I figure I’d better hurry up and get those first failures out of the way.

Well, lucky me – I already failed my first one (kind of.  Okay let’s not be so dramatic, not really.)  I only got as far as outlining my market players and photoshopping a few mock-website pages when I found a terrific looking startup called ReverbNation.  It looks like ReverbNation is providing just the right services that my startup was aiming to fill, and it looks like they’re doing a great job too.  The idea is to provide web tools for local small-time musicians.  So in my next post I’ll tell you more about ReverbNation and why I think that sites like them will be really important in the future of the music business – and all media business for that matter.  But first, for posterity sake, here are the sketches I did to start brainstorming for my version of the startup.

Your looking glass is inside out.

Another weird post, don’t read it, keep moving along now – nothing to read here….

No don’t kill my news!

I’ve been thinking about the death of newspapers alot lately.  And this article reminded me that I’ve been meaning to blog about it.

http://blog.wired.com/business/2009/01/five-things-goo.html#more

First of all, we can maybe afford the death of newspapers (NOT MY SUNDAY TIMES!, but okay it wouldn’t KILL us), but we CAN NOT afford the death of well established news – it is practically our 4th branch of government, right?  Regardless of how we feel about the Internet taking over news, I think we need to be conscious that the tradition of thorough news investigation needs to live on strong through the transition.  We can’t rely solely on scattered blogs to penetrate the murky workings of government corruption. (or can we?)

A huge percentage of print media’s revenue used to come from personal ads.  Now craigslist and google have virtually erased that money from Newsprint’s budget.  Should there be a bailout?  Should Google or craigslist feel responsible?  Or do something to help?  Are newspapers at fault for not adapting?  Is there simply nothing to be done?

SPEND MORE NOW! SAVE MORE NOW!

First of all, why are we bothering to send out a stimulus package (spend more!) and at the same time advertising that people should save more with the feed the pig campaign.

The stimulus package obviously does not add “real money” into the economy (we just print the money from our own bank), so the only good argument for the stimulus package is that it increases spending patterns.  So why is the AICPA spending money on an ad campaign that tells people to reduce spending patterns?

“The Congressional Budget Office defines the goal this way: ‘Fiscal
stimulus aims to boost economic activity during periods of economic
weakness by increasing short-term aggregate demand.’” – The New York Times Topic sheet on Economic Stimulus

I know that stimulus packages are a sound theory.  Yes they “work” in that they temporarily boost the economy by getting people into the habit of spending again.  I know it’s possible that the short term morale boost will carry over even after the stimulus money is spent, but mostly the spending spike will just be balanced out by lower spending the next week.  I’m not necessarily against the idea of a stimulus package, but I don’t think it begins to address our real economic problems.  It’s like taking pain killers to fight a broken arm – all you’re doing is masking the pain while the system heals.

It’s just so real

The real peter griffin

I heard this woman on NPR saying “It’s just so real” in a way that just stuck in my head.  So i made this bit to get it stuck in your head too -

(This picture doesnt have anything to do with this post – i just found it when i did a search for this title, i thought the track was weird on it’s own, but this picture really adds another level.)

Piezoelectrics: Cool, useful, but NOT an energy solution.

Piezoelectrics are an increasingly popular “green energy” topic.  Piezoelectrics are materials that generate a small voltage whenever they are mechanically deformed.  Recently innovative solutions that use Piezoelectrics to harness energy have been tested on everything from roads to subway foot traffic.  Innowattech is one company that has embedded their technology in roadways to harness energy from cars.

But there is a problem with how we are discussing this technology.  Like anything that obeys the laws of physics, Piezoelectrics only generate energy at the expense of the system – it isn’t free energy.  There are actually  lot of great uses for Piezoelectrics out there, but we won’t discover them if we keep talking about Piezoelectrics as a “free energy” solution.  If we look at this technology in terms of generating electricity, it is a failure.  Piezoelectrics on roads take energy at the expense of the cars’ fuel efficiency, and Piezoelectrics under subway floors will make you tired walking through the subway just like walking on the beach.

Would you host YOUR resume on a teen gossip site?

Guess what the industry standard is for musicians to post their resumes.  Yup, it’s still myspace.  I just found this yelp thread – I’m glad im not the only one who thinks this is incredulous.  I hope to launch a startup soon that will provide something better.

In the yelp thread, one comment mentions imeem.  True, imeem is the best alternative, but that’s not saying much.  It seems like imeem has still fallen into the same trap of being cluttered and slow to navigate.  Plus if you’re hoping for something revolutionary, it sounds like imeem has been sued into lame duck status. Although that article has reason to be bias, imeem just feels stale to me the same way that myspace does.  Then again i guess i have reason to be bias too.

“!” ?

I just wrote something I think is ridiculous, brash, and foolish. So naturally it’s perfect for this blog.
“Isms are where ideas go to die. Genres are epitaphs.” – me

Oh, and add arrogant to that list since i just quoted myself like a jerk face.

The long-tail market of Advertising with Local Bands

In wired’s business blog, epicenter, they report on a terrific service, TuneCore.  The service lets an artist pay a one time fee to post their music on online stores like iTunes, and recoup ALL future profits from the sales.  This is huge because it is one of the first steps towards ensuring that online stores have a complete warehouse of available media and not just the media of their corporate partners.

But the article especially focuses on a TuneCore experimental service: letting advertisers partner with musicians.

“Has there ever been a match like music and advertising? To oversimplify, bands have credibility and love but no money, while brands have money but no credibility and love.”  Of course, as wired points out, “the majority of the Wired.com readers we polled — still think there’s such a thing as selling out.”  Will bands want to endorse crappy corporations?

No.  But this is why I have been advocating that bands should be able to pick the advertisers – not the other way around.  This way, a band’s endorsement of a product is not a sell-out, it’s another artistic statement.