I travel with lots of little gadgets for media making. How do you carry yours? Show me your bag?
Since I am about to take off on a trip, I gathered up my stuff and took inventory. I was expected to be annoyed by the number of power supplies, but as Jim Storer pointed out, you can charge almost anything via USB these days. The more enlightened manufacturers equip their devices with USB ports, and for those that don't Malleable Devices provides adapters. It's a good thing, since the presence of a USB port on the device is not always a guarantee that the device will accept power that way. For example, my Nokia N95. Indeed, among my devices, only the laptop and the Bose headphones require custom power adapters.
My kit, clockwise from top center:
IBM (Lenovo) Thinkpad T43p
Logitech QuickCam Pro for Notebooks - for Seesmic and Skype
I'll dump the Treo as soon as I can figure out how to make the GPS work in the N95, although the separate Bluetooth GPS is convenient for sticking in the window of the airplane. Getting rid of that and a few power supplies might give me room for some clothes in my carry-on bag.
TweetWheel is yet another example of how a system as simple and elegant as Twitter can, with a suitably open API, spawn all sorts of interesting and useful applications.
You give TweetWheel your Twitter username and it shows you all the people you follow and draws arcs among them to show you which of your friends are following each other. It's a little buggy - not all the arcs show up, but it's an interesting way to measure the density of your social network. UPDATE: The developer says TweetWheel only fetches the first 100 friends for each of your friends, so that's why it can sometimes miss connections.
TweetWheel is the work of Augusto Becciu in Buenos Aires.
Thanks to Paul Grous for alerting me to this one and illustrating one of the valuable aspects of Twitter: "If the news is important it will find me,"
This morning the Boston Social Media Breakfast moved across the street to Ryles and filled the room with local entrepreneurs at Twitterati.
Today's topic was Hiring/Getting Hired in a 2.0 World. Stever Robbins led off with his Ten Great Cultural Career Lies (v3) and an admonition to use social media such as Twitter as a tool to make connections which can lead to a conversation rather than as a substitute for the conversation itself. (Video here.)
Aaron Strout described how he filled some recent positions at Mzinga by forsaking the usual resume/interview process and using social media to source and evaluate candidates. Of course he did end up bringing the finalists in for face-to-face meetings, but he found using Twitter, LinkedIn, etc to be much more productive than the old way of doing business, since it gave him more insight into the candidates than he could get through a prepared resume. He has more on his blog and there is video here
Todd Defren has been using a similar approach at SHIFT Communications. He said that for the most part the people they want to hire "are already known to them" through Twitter and other forms of social media. The last three hires came to them that way. [I have no video of his talk, since the combination of my Nokia N95/AT&T/Qik stopped working and I had to reboot my phone(!) but he has written about this at his blog.]
Chris Brogan gave an entertaining talk about how he got his first job at The Phone Company and how he left there (just in time) for a series of jobs where his reputation preceded him. (video)
During the Q&A (video, more video, even more video) I asked if hiring through social media branding applied equally well to positions outside of the marketing function. I've seen it work for PR people (Amanda Gravel at SHIFT, Amanda Mooney) and consultants (Stowe Boyd, Laura Fitton) but how well does it work for people whose jobs don't involve a market-facing role, such as engineering, IT, or accounting, or for companies who have not embraced social media. The answer from the speakers was that (1) al companies would need to embrace social media if they wanted to survive and (2) that if they didn't you wouldn't want to work there anyway. That was good advice for the assembled Faithful, but it may be a bit premature for the average job seeker. Certainly I favor putting my time and money into companies that practice transparent business practices and communicate well with their customers, including encouraging their employees to do the same, but how to explain the success of Apple which is one of the least transparent and social-media-aware companies in the industry. In the ensuing discussion, the best answer we could come up with is that if you are going to present an old-school, opaque interface to the world, you had better be damn good at it, like Steve Jobs. For the rest of us, Mark Twain had good advice: "If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything."
I wrote something on QR Codes last month, which hold a lot of promise as a way of embedding information in an off-line context, such as a print ad or billboard, and tying that to online information. Now SnapTell, Inc. of Palo Alto has come up with an elegant solution that doesn't require embedding any information at all. The user snaps a picture of the ad with his or her camera phone and emails in order to be entered into contests, receive special offers, etc. The current issue of Rolling Stone has five such ads (although one seemed to be missing), identified with a discrete logo. A separate, full page ad from SnapTell explains the program and gives the email address RS@snaptell.com. The SnapTell site matches the photograph against their database in order to identify the ad. The picture recognition appears very robust. So far, I've received an MP3 inviting me to visit MySpace.com to get a "valuable coupon" - worth a dollar towards a pizza (talk about indirection!), a free motorcycle ringtone from Allstate, shaving tips from the Edge Gel Girls, and a video clip from the Discovery Channel. We'll also see how much more spam I get.
I've been at ROFLCon 2008 at MIT yesterday and today. The conference has drawn 700 participants, most of them young enough to qualify as digital natives. The main topic was Internet Fame and appropriately enough the keynote speaker was David Weinberger who has extensively analyzed the phenomenon. He observed how fame was no longer in scarce supply and thus Andy Warhol's statement that "in the future everyone will be famous for 15 minutes" to "everyone will be famous to 15 people."
The speakers were a comprehensive collection of people who have achieved fame or notoriety on or because of the Internet, including
Most of these people did not set out to be famous, but did something personal that was just quirky enough to spread virally. Once they achieved a certain fame, most of them were pursued by professional advertising and marketing people who wanted to figure out how to replicate their success, but most were at a loss for how someone could bottle it and sell it. A few had made some real money - most had not "quit their day jobs" but they all seemed to enjoy what they were doing although there was a pervasive fear that it might be taken away at any time - not because of a collapse of a bubble but from a collapse of network neutrality.
I arrived at MIT a little early for ROFLCOn, so I took a walk around the campus to visit some favorite spots. MIT has some great sculpture erected as the result of a policy that sets aside money from each new building to incorporate art. The best know is Alexander Calder's Great Sail in front of the Green Building. It was controversial when it was installed in 1966, but was considered a classic by the time a similar controversy erupted around Louise Nevelson's Transparent Horizon a decade later. For the first few years, it was "polychromed" several times, but now it is back to its intended black and is an accepted part of the campus.
One delightful surprise was Sol LeWitt's, Bars of Color Within Squares, which is in the floor surrounding
the new Center for Theoretical Physics - a building within a building in a space that was formerly the Atomic Courtyard.
I also visited some places on the Tunnel Tour. Unfortunately the Tomb of the Unknown Tool is now blocked off to casual visitors and the Tomb II is in disrepair, but the tunnel system itself has been greatly extended. One can walk indoors from 77 Mass Ave almost all the way to the Kendall Square T stop.
My home server runs Linux, but I recently came across this very clever viral ad campaign from last December for Microsoft's Home Server, including a "children's book" which contains endearing explanations of how the server came to be in your house: "When a mommy and a daddy love each other very much..."
You can purchase the book (for $5.95) from Amazon or read it at www.stayathomeserver.com where you can also view some videos shot in the style of Stephen Colbert.
When Josh Bernoff told me that he and Charlene Li were writing a book about social technologies my first question was how were they going to describe something so fast moving as social technologies in a medium as static and slow to produce as a book. The answer, as evidenced in Groundswell is that they concentrated on the forces and trends behind the individual products and came up with a framework to evaluate new developments as they occur. The authors also lived up to the principles they espoused in the book by setting up a web site to continue the discussion. The result is a book that anyone running a business or responsible for marketing a product in the 21st century must read.
The book is targeted directly at the marketing executive in a medium to large company who may be seized by a creeping dread that something his happening out there and needs advice what it is and what to do about it. The central message of the book is that the trend towards your customers getting things from each other - the Groundswell - is unstoppable, but that not only can you understand it and live with it but that you can thrive in it.
Anyone who has been working in the social media field will be familiar with the technologies described in the book, such as social networking sites, blogs, wikis and user-generated content, and will recall many of the anecdotes such as the Streisand Effect, but the book also presents a wealth of data on user characteristics and a series of enlightening case studies that derive from the authors (and their colleagues) research at Forrester. Perhaps the most useful contribution is what the book calls the Social Technographics Profile - essentially a way of measuring how the target audience participates in social media, from the Creators who publish a blog through the Critics, Collectors, Joiners, and Spectators and finally the Inactives. By assessing where one's customers fall in this space it is possible to make reasoned judgments about which social technologies will be most appropriate.
The authors also introduce the POST methodology: People, Objectives, Strategy, Technology - assessing where the people one is addressing fall in the previously mentioned profile and the establishing which objectives make the most sense and what strategies and technologies best support those objectives.
The book presents case studies for the four objectives of Talking, Energizing, Supporting, and Embracing one's customers and gives plenty of examples of how to do each, and concludes with chapters on the organizational changes which are necessary and likely to result by applying the provided prescriptions.
In summary, Groundswell provides a comprehensive picture of social technology together with practical advice of how to apply it. If you are in charge of your organizations marketing budget you need to read this before you go out and spend your money on banner ads.
Om Malik observes that SMS apps on Facebook get very little usage. Although he found three dozen of them, the most popular only get around 500 daily users in an environment where games like Scrabulous get 1,000 times that. He further observes that Facebook VoIP widgets suffer a similar fate and posits that despite Daniel Berninger's argument for the utility of a social directory, people in Facebook don't really want to communicate with each other in real time.
I've observed the same phenomenon but have a somewhat different theory. Facebook encourages a definition of "friend" that encompasses a much larger group than those people I would want to interrupt with an SMS or a phone call. If I know someone well enough to SMS or call them, I already have them in my contact list and synced to my mobile phone from which I can message or call them without opening any widgets. There is still plenty of utility in tying Facebook to SMS - Facebook's own Mobile app gets more than 370,000 daily users, but it provides unique functionality such as broadcasting news feeds. I think there is plenty of opportunity to use SMS as a way of connecting people with applications, but if two people just want to talk to each other they will reach for the phone.
The annual Nantucket Conference has just announced their agenda for this year. This event, organized by Alyssa Stern and Shayne Gilbert of Future Forward Events, LLC is the East Coast equivalent of D or Web 2.0, bringing together a Who's Who of entrepreneurs, investors, and press from throughout New England. Again this year they've enlisted Scott Kirsner to help with the agenda. Since returning to Boston from Silicon Valley, Scott has become one of the primary boosters of our local high-tech industry and the lineup is a good snapshot of where we've been recently and where we are going, and it includes a few "outsiders" who should bring a much-needed perspective to what can sometimes appear to be a self-contained community.
The conference is May 1-3 on, where else, Nantucket, which by then will have emerged from Winter but not yet be overrun with the Summer's crowds. The event is invitation-only, but don't let that stop you, You can request an invitation here. I would recommend this conference to anyone in New England who is starting or running a high-tech company and wants to network with other people can help.
John Simson, Executive Director of SoundExchange, gave a talk yesterday at the Harvard Law School. SoundExchange is a non-profit organization set up to collect performance royalties from digital media such as internet and satellite radio and distribute them to artists and record labels. Simson and SoundExchange unabashedly represent the interests of the copyright owners in maximizing their revenue, but Simson 's talk explained the motivations of all of the stakeholders in this game and the complexities of arriving at a fair level of compensation in what is essentially a political process.
Simson traced the history of music copyrights from 1848 when French composer Ernest Bourget heard his music being played in a nightclub and refused to pay for his dinner. The court ruled that he did need to pay, but so also did the café owner, leading to the founding of SACEM and 150 years of legislation and litigation as the recording industry and later radio, television, and the internet created new ways for people to obtain and listen to music.
There are a number of factors that make music copyright complex, from the evolving concept of intellectual property which attempts to balance compensation of creators with the benefit to society, to the variety of stakeholders: composers, musicians, music publishers, radio, movie, and television producers, and listeners of all types. Add to that the way digital technology enables making cheap, perfect copies and blurs the distinction between performance and ownership and you have a world in which there is little precedent for how to apportion the benefits and the spoils go to whichever group can muster the best lobbysists as well as the best arguments.
Simson, who was a musician and an attorney before becoming a registered lobbyist himself described his education into the ways of Washington, where legislators are expected to vote on 2500 issues a year and may only be expert on five of them. As said was explained to him, a congressman looks at his mail. If it is all on one side, the decision is easy, but if there are even a few letters on the other side, he will go talk to a colleague who is an expert, such as Rep. Howard Berman (D-Cal) on entertainment law.
One thorny problem is the way business models are evolving on the Internet. This manifested itself in the debate over the royalties that Internet radio would pay. The largest Internet radio sites have plenty of subscription and/or advertising revenues and can pay royalties similar to those paid by terrestrial radio, but the smaller ones may have no income at all. Given the way the Internet economy works, some companies may eventually monetize by building a large user base and then being acquired, as happened when Last.fm was purchased by CBS for $280 million. It seemed that Simson and the interests he represents are pained by this scenario and if they can not partake in such gains would prefer to see all Internet radio pay on a per-use basis even if that prevents some of them from getting started. I asked him after his talk if SoundExchange would be open to more creative financial arrangements with emerging businesses. He said they would gladly participate as a clearing house for anything the Internet companies and the artists could agree upon, but the anti-trust exemption SoundExchange operates under limits its abilities to initiate schemes outside what the Congress has defined.
One interesting bit of data was on the long tail nature of Internet radio. SoundExchange brings in $140 million per year in revenue which is split 50/50 between the performers and the owner of the copyright of the recording. There are 31,000 performers SoundExchange has tracked down who represent 75% of the performers share of the revenue. However, there are another 40,000 performers who have yet to be tracked down. Most of them are owed $50 or less, but occasionally SoundExchange gets in touch with one and sends them a check for $8,000 or more. Simson said they are always glad to get the money, but these days people are very suspicious when they get an unsolicited email or a phone call from a total stranger offering them a check. [The preceding paragraph was edited to incorporate comments I received.]
Another aspect of the long tail is the need to get accurate data on which songs are being played. When SoundExchange compared the results of using the sampling done by ASCAP and BMI to getting actual census data, they found that the sampling method missed 41% of the artists and 26% of the titles. This phenomenon has caused no small amount of grumbling from "middle class" artists who are waiting for their first royalty check and SoundExchange would like to avoid this problem, but the Internet radio businesses have claimed that gathering this information is too cumbersome and expensive.
After the talk, I asked Simson about Pandora. They have been paying SoundExchange as if they were an Internet radio station, but under the Digital Performance Right in Sound Recordings Act of 1995 (DPRA) the license which SoundExchange administers does not apply to an "interactive service" which is defined as "one that enables a member of the public to receive, on request, a transmission of a particular sound recording chosen by or on behalf of the recipient." One could argue that since Pandora creates a separate stream for each user that it is "interactive" but no one wants to rock the boat right now since (a) they are paying real money, (b) there is no other convenient way for Pandora to pay, and (c) there are other pending cases seeking to define what is interactive.
In summary, Simson's talk highlighted the complexity of innovation in music licensing. The only thing everyone can agree on is that the music industry is in trouble and needs new business models. This talk illustrated how challenging that will be.
Cambridge University Press, Oxford University Press, and Sage Publications filed a complaint yesterday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia, accusing Georgia State University of violating their copyrights by making digital "course packs" available to students on the University's Library Web site. This is the first such case to involve digital distribution, but is similar to a 1991 case, Basic Books v. Kinko's and a 1992 case, Princeton University Press v. Michigan Document Services (MDS), that involved arguments over what constituted fair use for printed course packs.
The controversy stems from section 107 of the copyright act which states that fair use includes making "multiple copies for classroom use" but then goes on to say that in any particular case this must be weighed against the effect of the use upon the potential market for the work.
Both Kinko and MDS were decided in the lower courts in favor of the
plaintiffs and ultimately settled, so there is no nationally binding
precedent. Also, both of the previous cases involved for-profit
ventures.
The publishers are a little bit ahead of the music industry here, in that they have already established a mechanism through the Copyright Clearance Center for electronic licensing of course materials, although it is not possible to tell from the Web site how much the fees would be. How this case gets decided may determine what the ultimate business model will be for unbundling chapters of books just as the music industry has grappled with unbundling of albums.
Other coverage:
The New York Times ran a long article on this case today in the business section.
The Association of American Publishers issued a press release.
In part 1 I shared a few observations about how the music industry had gotten to its current state. In this part, I'll start looking at some proposed solutions.
One concept that keeps surfacing is replacing some or all of the revenues currently raised by music sales with some sort of tax. The revenues so raised would be distributed to artists through a clearinghouse mechanism similar to the way the fees assessed on radio stations are apportioned by ASCAP, BMI and SESAC. William Fisher has explored this idea in detail in Promises to Keep from which the diagram at right is excerpted. Fisher expends considerable effort on determining the appropriate compensation level, which is essentially a political decision. After considering using the "full social value" of the creations he concludes that number would be too high, given that most other professions, e.g. teaching, don't enjoy that luxury. He also rejects giving creators what they "deserve" since economists have struggled with that concept for centuries without success. What he settles on is preserving the status quo by substituting new taxes for old sales revenues. Since the book was written in 2004 there is now the additional problem of deciding which status quo to preserve. He proposes 2000, which was when music revenues began to fall, although that argument dodges the issue of how much of the fall was due to unauthorized copying and how much was due to other factors.
In the long run, the amount of tax money to funnel to the entertainment industry would be a political one, as would the precise method of collecting and distributing it. If you thought the $125 million appropriation for the National Endowment for the Arts engendered controversy, wait until the battles break out over the $2.5 billion FIsher estimates would be needed under his proposal. And that was before the Iraq war and the current economic problems.
While Fisher makes a good argument for the efficiency of funding his scheme out of general revenues, he also explores levying a tax on recording devices and Internet access. Such schemes would likely be more politically palatable although they would be more expensive to administer and more likely to cause distortions in the marketplace. There are also issues with the accuracy and privacy of any system that was used to measure what material was consumed, topics which Fisher covers in considerable detail.
None of these problems have prevented Warner Music from proposing a $5.00/month music tax in the US and others from proposing similar schemes in Europe.
Somehow with the governments worldwide dealing with the rescue of Bear Stearns and others to follow, rescuing the music industry is likely to take a back burner for a while. Still, anyone considering any redistribution scheme whether mandated or voluntary should find Fisher's analysis highly valuable.
Sandy Kalik post about how Social Media is Anti-Social reminded me of a dinner I attended when I was running the Mobile Communications Group at Lotus. We were with some colleagues from SkyTel, one of the pioneers in two-way paging, and Motorola, who manufactured the devices. Everyone at the dinner had a SkyTel pager and at one point I noticed that no one was talking - they were all sending and receiving text messages. One of the SkyTel executives looked up knowingly and said it was "Sky Silence."
UPDATE: Via Twitter, @skalik added some new terms:
Chris Brogan asked a Twitter question this morning:
I wrote something on 
It's been several weeks since April 1st, but 
Cambridge University Press, Oxford University Press, and Sage Publications filed a 
