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Round-up of talk and interviews

Tue, 07 Jul 2009 09:48:33 -0700

In a brisk (?!) follow-up to my last blog entry, I did a talk to teenagers from three Sheffield schools on the subject "Big Brother is Logging You", sharing the platform with Dave Pattern, Library Systems Manager at University of Huddersfield, who also featured in the TILE libraries event. This was part of the Sheffield 14-19 Diplomas initiative. It was also an experiment in speaking to one physical audience and two 'virtual' ones via videolink, with the occasionally sub-optimal results you might expect with remote teenagers. Both my and Dave's presentations are available online, as Powerpoint, Word supporting materials, and Quicktime video of each section of our talks (unfortunately not embeddable, as far as I can see).

Bringing things almost bang up to date, I was at the Reboot Britain yesterday, and recorded a couple of short interviews with Steve Lawson on AudioBoo. In the first one I revisit and update one of my old, old hobby horses, scepticism in the face of hype about games in learning. Then another old chestnut, mentioning how what Tony Ageh said yesterday about opening up the BBC Archives reminded me of similar proposals made almost five years ago.

Listen!

Later Steve got me together with Stan Stalnaker of Hub Culture for a discussion. I'd literally only heard of Hub Culture three minutes before the discussion began, so you can hear me trying to work out whether this is an up-market managed workspace or an invitation-only business network, or some combination of the two. Even after hearing Stan speak later in the day, I wasn't entirely clear. Steve was kind enough to tweet my off-the-record explanation for why I didn't answer his second question.

Listen!

There are plenty more Reboot Britain audio interviews, along with social media of all flavours.

I hesitate before apologising for blogging so infrequently recently. Firstly I've been slowing down for a couple of years now, so it probably comes as no surprise to long-term followers. Secondly, it always seems kind of vain to imagine that people are hanging around waiting for my next bons mots (I know that I personally appreciate those bloggers who discipline themselves to populate my RSS reader only when they have something noteworthy to contribute — which standard you may feel this entry fails to meet!). I've come to the conclusion that it's unwise to create the expectation of being a one-person media channel, because you will find it becomes a rod for your own back — unless your ambition is to build a career with a one-person media channel at its centre.

With that exculpation out of the way, I admit that since I lost the habit of blogging regularly, it has been difficult to get it back. So I probably shouldn't say that I'm planning to blog a bit more in the near future — because I haven't always delivered on such statements in the past — but I am.

Shownar: reflecting online buzz around BBC programmes

(author unknown) — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 01:17:55 -0700

Shared by David Jennings
Interesting venture by the BBC to aggregate what's being said about their programmes, and thus create a kind of overview of 'buzz'. Sadly, the few instances that I looked at were dominated by banal tweets with variants on "I watched/listened to this programme; so should you" ad nauseam.

Today sees the launch of Shownar; a new prototype from BBC Vision which aims to track online buzz around BBC TV and radio programmes and reflect it back in useful and interesting ways, aiding programme discovery and providing onward journeys to discussion about those programmes on the wider web.

For as long as the BBC has been making programmes, audiences have been talking about them and we have done our best to showcase some of those conversations on-air, via programmes like Feedback and Points of View. However, it is only with the advent of the internet that those conversations have become accessible to a much wider audience. Here on bbc.co.uk we have a range of blogs, messageboards and other commenting tools, which enable users to talk about our output. However, much of the conversation about BBC programming inevitably happens away from bbc.co.uk on people's personal blogs or microblogging services such as Twitter.

Shownar aims to track the wealth of activity that takes place around BBC progammes online and work out which are currently gaining the most attention. So why do it? To borrow from the site's About pages: "First, it will help you find shows that others have not only watched, but are talking about. Hopefully it'll throw up a few hidden gems. People's interest, attention and engagement with shows are more important to Shownar than viewing figures; the audience size of a documentary on BBC FOUR, for instance, will never approach that of EastEnders, but if that documentary sparks a lot of interest and comment - even discussion - we want to highlight it. And second, when you've found a show of interest, we want to assist your onward journey by generating links to related discussions elsewhere on the web. In the same way news stories are improved by linking out to the same story on other news sites, we believe shows are improved by connecting them to the wider discussion and their audience."

So, how does it work? In the first instance, we decided to focus on tracking in-bound links to programme-related pages on bbc.co.uk, so we could be confident that the discussions were actually about a BBC programme, rather than a different usage of, say, 'archers' or 'apprentice' (although intelligent keyword matching remains a future aspiration). Rather than develop technology to crawl the web ourselves, we decided to partner with data providers who were already doing that, and who could supply us with good, clean data. We took a look at a range of possible suppliers, and for this initial prototype chose data provided by Yahoo! Search BOSS, Nielson Online's BlogPulse (which indexes over 100 million blogs), and Twingly (which searches microblogging services like Twitter, Jaiku and Identi.ca for links, even when they are shortened using URL shortening services such as TinyURL and bit.ly). We are also ingesting data from LiveStats, the BBC's own real-time indicator of traffic. Once ingested, this data is processed according to a specially created algorithm to calculate the 'buzz measure' for every BBC programme - more detail on the algorithm can be found on Shownar's Technical information page.

The front-end interface offers a range of different ways into the data, from the 'fresh buzz' chart on the homepage, to the schedule heatmap which shades the 'hottest' programmes on each of the BBC's TV channels / radio stations (which also have their own pages). There is also a Catch up on iPlayer page, enabling you to filter programmes available to watch on demand by channel, genre and time of day. The genre cuts are particularly compelling, enabling you to see, for example, which Comedy programmes are generating the most buzz. There's also the blueprint, which provides full access to all of the data, including permalinks, so I can tell you that the most buzzed about factual TV programme at midday on Monday 22nd June was BBC Two's James May on the Moon.

The site has been live as an internal BBC beta for a few weeks now and it's already started to have a real impact on my consumption habits, introducing me to programmes I had missed in the schedules such as Radio 2's Back from the Dead: The Return of Spinal Tap, BBC One's Famous, Rich and Homeless and BBC Two's NASA: Triumph and Tragedy. It's also doing the job I hoped it would do in terms of onward journeys, with particularly rich discussion around Radio 4's The Reith Lectures. To find out how your blog links and microblog updates can end up on Shownar (and for information about moderation) visit the Get involved page.

We're keen to hear your feedback on Shownar, so please leave a comment below or send us your thoughts by email. If the prototype proves successful, we are hoping to integrate the functionality of Shownar into bbc.co.uk. Possible future developments include additional data sources and a full API.

Shownar was designed and built by Schulze & Webb, with input from a small BBC project team: Katherine Sommers, Mark Simpkins, Catherine Wingate, Yuri Kang, Andrew Barron, Chris Sizemore and myself. We hope you enjoy using it.

Dan Taylor is Senior Portfolio Executive, Internet for BBC Vision.

The Pirate Bay and The Pirate Google

(author unknown) — Sun, 26 Apr 2009 02:45:11 -0700

Shared by David Jennings
Smart commentary on The Pirate Bay verdict from David Weinberger, being incisive by being funny. "I don’t think it’s a double standard. Intent counts. The difference between the Heimlich maneuver and assault is intent, and that’s as it should be." (That's not the funny bit; but I think it's telling.)

ThePirateBay has links to content hosted elsewhere that’s available for download using the BitTorrent protocol. The site also provides a search engine for finding that content, and a page for each torrent with information about the content. It doesn’t distinguish between content that’s protected by copyright and content that isn’t. The four founders of ThePirateBay were convicted by a Swedish court last week. They were fined a middling amount, and were sentenced to a year in jail. (”What’re you in for?” “Improper use of metadata.”)

Now there is ThePirateGoogle, created by someone to make a point. There you can use the Google search engine to search for content hosted elsewhere, available for download using the BitTorrent protocol. It doesn’t distinguish between content that’s protected by copyright and content that isn’t.

Here’s the text from ThePirateGoogle site:

Bit Torrent Search

Please Note: This site is not affiliated with Google, it simply makes use of Google Custom Search to restrict your searches to Torrent files. You can do this with any regular Google search by appending your query with filetype:torrent. This technique can be used for any type of file supported by Google.

The intention of this site is to demonstrate the double standard that was exemplified in the recent Pirate Bay Trial. Sites such as Google offer much the same functionality as The Pirate Bay and other Bit Torrent sites but are not targeted by media conglomerates such as the IFPI as they have the political and legal clout to defend themselves unlike these small independent sites.

This site is created in support of an open, neutral internet accessible and equitable to all regardless of political or financial standing.

Cheers!

Yes, you can do with Google what you do with ThePirateBay. For example, do the following search at Google:

filetype:torrent “the dark knight”

There’s obviously a difference in intent between ThePirateBay and Google. But there is precious little relevant difference in the service. So, why jail the founders of ThePirateBay but not the founders of Google since either can be used to find copyright-protected torrents? Having the wrong mental attitude? (”What are you in for?” “Intent to improperly use metadata.”)

What to make of this? I find myself in a jumble:

1. I don’t think it’s a double standard. Intent counts. The difference between the Heimlich maneuver and assault is intent, and that’s as it should be. ThePirateBay is intended to enable the sharing of copyrighted works: TPB has facilities designed to help you locate, evaluate, and share files, including a page for each torrent with comments, ratings, descriptions, and the number of seeders and leechers (to see how alive the torrent is). And it’s named The freaking Pirate Bay. There may or may not be a law in Sweden against what TPB does, but it’s disingenuous to say that the site is ethically the same as Google.

3. ThePirateGoogle shows that shutting down ThePirateBay is not going to stop the use of BitTorrent to share copyrighted files. But jailing TPB’s founders may slow sharing down. Torrent site after torrent site has been shut down over the past few years, making it harder to find and download files now. The verdict in TPB case, especially with its jail sentence, will slow down the torrent of torrents, although perhaps not by much.

4. Just in case someone tells you otherwise: The BitTorrent protocol is not the issue here. It’s a brilliant way of sharing large files, and it’s used all over the place for perfectly legal file-sharing.

5. I don’t know what to do about copyright. It’s obviously spun out of control and needs to be pulled back in — lasting 70 years after the death of the creator is absurd — but we need to do far more than just shorten its term. Compensating creators for every use of their works obviously contradicts the maximal open sharing and reuse of works that drives culture forward. Creating a legal and economic environment with incentives for creators does not contradict the open sharing and reuse of works. The question is: Which legal/economic environment would work best? I don’t know — I wish I did — but I suspect it’s one in which copyrighting a work takes a little bit of effort, not all categories of work have the same copyright protections, the terms are way way way shorter than they are now, fair use is greatly extended, infringement only counts if it actually hurts sales (in the way that most mashups do not), compensation does not come from accounting for each and every use of a work, and we start rewarding those who release their works into the public domain by showering them with affection, cultural uptake, and some money.

That’s about seven steps short of an actual copyright reform program. But I find the whole topic headache-making and, frankly, depressing. [Tags: thepiratebay google copyright copyleft ]

1. ThePirateBay posts all the legal letters it gets, plus its replies. Feisty doesn’t begin to describe the replies.

2. The judge in the case seems to have ties to the copyright industry. The lawyer for one of the defendants is calling for a new trial.

The Pirate's Dilemma

(author unknown) — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 01:59:06 -0700

Shared by David Jennings
Matt Mason, author of The Pirate's Dilemma, gives his pessimistic account of the consequences of the Pirate Bay verdict.

Pirate Bay founder Peter Sunde said after the trial that “there’s no difference between us and Google.” The judge thought there was a difference – intent. The Pirate Bay was clearly all about file-sharing, Google is not. But thanks to this trial the next generation of file-sharing sites will be much more secretive. The next mutation of The Pirate Bay will have no subversive rhetoric and won’t mock the labels and studios chasing it. It will be silent. It won’t respond. It wont be nearly as fun as TPB, but there will be no real differences between it and Google. No one will be able to prove intent, making it even more of a threat. Doesn’t exactly sound like a win for anybody in the business of creating content.

Is music recommendation broken? [The Guardian]

(author unknown) — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 09:06:30 -0700

Shared by David Jennings
Report on Paul Lamere's panel on music recommendations at SXSW interactive.

Music recommendation is not doing its job, says Paul Lamere, director of developer community at 'machine listening' specialists The Echo Nest. However long the long tail of music, mechanical recommendation is biased towards what the majority of listeners do because brand new bands have very little audience and little related data.

Sleeve Notes [BBC - BBC Radio 4 Programmes]

(author unknown) — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 06:32:38 -0800

Shared by David Jennings
Interesting 30 minute feature on the craft of the sleeve note and how it relates to its parent album, featuring references to sleeve notes written by Jerry Wexler, Bill Evans, Jarvis Cocker and others. Sleeve notes are yesterday's metadata and tomorrow's Songbird plug-in.

Music writer Laura Barton explains her love of the sleeve note, which was once, for many, the cherished gateway into a musical world but has now been diminished by the digitalisation of music.

She considers how the sleeve note can act as a declaration of intent from the artist, as epitomised by Johnny Cash's sleeve notes for his classic 1968 live album, At Folsom Prison, or by the inclusion of the founding declaration of the Rock Against Racism movement on the sleeve of Tom Robinson's debut album Power in the Darkness.

Facebook et al risk 'infantilising' the human mind |

(author unknown) — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 01:36:24 -0800

Social network sites risk infantilising the mid-21st century mind, leaving it characterised by short attention spans, sensationalism, inability to empathise and a shaky sense of identity, according to a leading neuroscientist.

Streaming music: even better than the real thing? [The Guardian]

(author unknown) — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 03:31:54 -0800

Shared by David Jennings
I missed this article when it was first published three weeks ago, but it's an interesting assessment of where streaming is replacing downloading (access is replacing ownership) in listening behaviour.

With computing becoming increasingly cloud-based, it no longer seems necessary to download or store music. As network connectivity becomes pervasive, the possibility of having every piece of commercially available music at our fingertips, instantly playable via our next-generation portable music players, mobile phones and Wi-Fi home entertainment systems comes closer. So will downloading digital music to an iPod soon seem as archaic as taping the Top 40 on to a C90?

Composer's Neanderthal recreation [BBC News]

(author unknown) — Sun, 08 Feb 2009 09:20:08 -0800

Shared by David Jennings
Interesting artistic re-imagining of Steven Mithen's ideas about the emergence of music and language in prehistoric culture.

A musical experience with a difference is being previewed at the National Museum Wales in Cardiff - an attempt to recreate the sound of the Neanderthals.

Jazz composer Simon Thorne was given the task of creating the "soundscape" to provide a musical backdrop to some of the ancient exhibits on display.

Applying the lessons of Last.fm to libraries and learning

Fri, 06 Feb 2009 14:30:48 -0800

If fans can discover interesting new music by comparing their listening profiles with those of people with similar tastes, why not apply similar principles to students' discovery of books as they explore how to get the most from university libraries. I have an article in the Association of Learning Technology's current newsletter. It's based around a day of talks about the TILE Project (that's Towards Implementation of Library 2.0 & the e-Framework, in case you couldn't guess), and it starts like this:

"You looked at The Complete Essays by Montaigne; you might also consider The Renaissance in Europe: A Reader edited by Whitlock." Most of us are familiar with Amazon’s gently pushy way of suggesting further purchases. If you're a music fan, you may have tried “scrobbling” each song you listen to into the massive Last.fm database of listener behaviour. In return for this gift of your data, you get to explore the habits of others who share some of your tastes, and you get a series of recommendations for other music you might enjoy.

Then it goes on like this. It's kind of surprising that these methods are now fairly well established in retail and entertainment, but not in learning. Perhaps that's because educational institutions remain wary of the ways of informal learning, as though such social propagation of ideas were somehow an unruly and untutored threat (it's not).

This may be starting in university libraries, but my hunch is that it's going to spread through all large-scale learning provision over the next decade. I wonder whether this on learndirect's corporate radar (I'm sure some individuals there will have been thinking seriously about it already).

The problem of time. The eternal crisis of music-based social networks.

(author unknown) — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 02:51:46 -0800

Shared by David Jennings
Musician and networker extraordinaire Steve Lawson describes his personal approach to dealing with the surplus of music available to him -- specifically that from the 100s/1000s of musicians who are his contacts on social networks. He needs a story, an angle, a context to draw him in (is this a plea for the merits of old fashioned journalism?)

So, context: I’m on Myspace, ReverbNation, Last.fm, Facebook and Twitter. Oh, and Youtube, Vimeo, Seesmic, Phreadz…etc. etc.

All of them are social networks. On all of them, not surprisingly, I get followed/added/friended by a lot of musicians and bands.

Which is all well and good, except that I can’t listen to them. Not ‘won’t‘, ‘can’t‘ - the numbers don’t add up. Even if we ignore the 8000 myspace friends I deleted before christmas, we’re still looking and thousands of interactions. Even if I only listened to one song from each, that’s upwards of 4000 minutes of listening time, just to grant each of them a cursory ear. And given that a handful of them will really catch my imagination, I’ll probably end up listening to them a lot over time.

Add in that my listening time is already taken up by copious amounts of the music I love and a fair chunk of trusted friend recommendations, and the amount of time I have available to check out random stuff thrown at me on Myspace is tiny.

So what are we to do?

Let’s use me as TWO case studies. First as a music fan/listener.

Some facts about music-listening-Stevie:

I love discovering new music
Other than ‘it’s great’, it’s pretty tough for me to define a type of music I like. The one nearly-unifying element is that I tend to go for music with a story, whether vocal or instrumental.
[As it relates to the second point, ‘Solo bass’ is not, as far as I can tell, a genre. Neither should it be.]
I listen to an awful lot of music by people I know/have met.
I discover a lot of music from friends recommending it.
I have online a list of ALL the music I’ve listened to over the last 5 years.
Meeting an artist quite often moves their music from ‘have heard‘ to ‘required listening‘ in my estimations.
That being said, the majority of my music listening time is spent listening to things I already love.

So, what does all that mean?

It means I’m not going to listen to a band just because they ‘add’ me. I resent the idea that I should spend my valuable time on music without context. The worst culprits of this (it’s why I included it in the list above) are solo bass players. I say ‘worst’ - to be fair, it makes sense that they would send stuff my way. After all, I am a solo bass player and am interested in what’s going on within the field of solo bass performance, but only as it over-laps with great music! I’ve never been into the gymnastic, technical side of music. If it doesn’t work as a straight recording, without explanation, it doesn’t work for me.

Right, so just sending me a message saying ‘check out my solo bass stuff‘ isn’t going to cut it. which of those other points give us angles to work?

What we need to look for are where the filters are, and how to get into those filter-streams. So what flags music for me as being worth investigating? largly these two:

My friends recommend it,
or I know the artist…

It’s pretty safe to say that ALL the musicians on twitter that I’ve bothered to click through and listen to are those who I find interesting apart from their music.

Is it an efficient way of finding great music? Possibly, possibly not. But it does provide me with a few things:

a way of just cutting down the sheer numbers. Relatively arbitrarily, but it works.
a way into one of those things I like about music: the story - I’m actually getting the story first, then the soundtrack…
a way of making sure I’m less likely to listen to music by people I don’t like. There’s SO MUCH amazing music out there, I might as well limit myself to listening to the ones I really like as people
a way of encouraging people AWAY from spam and TOWARDS engagement. It’s what I want, it’s what I do, it’s what works.

And In Part II of ‘The Problem Of Time’, I’ll talk about what this does for me as a musician.

How does this chime with your experience of finding music online? Similar? Completely different? How much GREAT music have you found? I’d love to hear your experiences.

200+ Music Industry, Marketing, Social Media and Tech Blogs That ...

(author unknown) — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 04:04:14 -0800

Shared by David Jennings
A long list, divided into categories (I'm slightly surprised to find DJ Alchemi listed as a tech blog), for anyone who hasn't got enough RSS feeds to read.

200+ Music Industry, Marketing, Social Media and Tech Blogs That’ll Make You A Media Whore! Jan 29, 2009 Author: Adrian Fusiarski | Filed under: Digital Audio, Music Industry, Musicbiz Resources, News Feeds, News Resources, RSS, ...

2009 - The Pull Music Paradigm Shift Emerges

(author unknown) — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 02:33:22 -0800

Shared by David Jennings
This is a really interesting and provocative piece about music discovery, and almost worthy of the overused term "paradigm shift" if it delivers on the full promise. Having said that, it starts off with the idea of "artist-initiated self-promotion vanishing" (truly radical) and ends with the more sober and less revolutionary plan that "_mass-market promotion_ will have short shelf life" (much more modest). Big difference. I like the framing of this shift to pull-based music discovery and I hope it happens. It depends on some very complex and untested (in the market) metadata and visualisation technologies really delivering on their promise. I hope they do, but I'm a little sceptical. After all, Google still presents its main offering as a linear list of words...

Here’s my prediction promise the project I’m working on: I intend to end the need to promote music. Outside of the social promotion people do after they discover music, artist-initiated self-promotion should vanish like the dinosaurs. But, that’s a mid-term goal. In 2009, I want everyone that thinks about the music business to have the Pull Music Paradigm Shift on his or her radar. If you have a music industry plan that begins in 2009, you have to put some of these eggs in your basket.

I’m intentionally jumping the music discovery and recommendation rails and calling it all the Pull Music Paradigm Shift because the music discovery tools that you’ve experienced so far haven’t shifted more than a bit of behavior. However, the stuff that’s about to come out of multiple R&D labs will shift an entire industry from furious push-promotion to pull-ready optimization as fast and as sure as Google changed ordinary business.

Over the last ten years, Google unwound two hundred years of the ability to price ‘business’ based upon whom you know and whom you take out to dinner. Google’s relentless dedication to organizing the world’s information has given us all dead-simple access to the knowledge of where stuff is and what it costs. Now, for just about anything consumers want, they can ‘go direct’ at the lowest price; no middlemen needed or included.

The Pull Music Paradigm Shift will change the music industry like Google changed the business world. Push middlemen with secrets and access to exposure and success will give way to a new layer of pull optimizers and pull experts that are skilled at leveraging pull technology and navigating the Shift.

I’m compelled to reiterate that this is a business plan, not a prediction. In this post, I am going to describe how it works and what will be different as pull overtakes push (promotion).

Like any technology, what I’m describing is evolving; it doesn’t and it won’t work perfectly at first, but it doesn’t have to. The world is drowning in music. The technology described here is a productivity tool that will be used to chop the haystack down from 30,000,0000 songs (plus the million songs a year that are being uploaded to the internet now) to 30,000 to 3,000 to 300 songs (needles). Moreover, it’s only going to get better over time.

The technology and methods you probably haven’t you seen yet.
I’m not talking about simple recommendation tools like Genius from iTunes, and I am not talking about any existing websites that currently feature a bit of music discovery technology. The Pull Music Paradigm Shift leverages everything you have seen today plus core technologies that will be available in 2009/2010. Here’s a rundown (1,2,3):

1) Music Experience Interfaces
Music Experience Interfaces (MEIs) will enable users to chop through mountains of music in minutes. MEIs can be visual, tactile, haptic (think Wii controller) and auditory all at the same time. Imagine using your hand to skim through music as it’s visualized on a wide screen, while rapidly listening to overlapping clips to find the exact songs or the music experiences (playlists) you desire. Have you seen the user interfaces in the movie Minority Report?

The video above is not a mockup; it’s footage from a working application (under development) created by Paul Lamere’s team at Sun Labs in Massachusetts (The AURA Project). Paul and his team have some of the smartest music discovery technology I have seen yet. If you are an executive working in the music industry, make an appointment to visit Sun when you’re in the Boston area. Contact me for additional information.

Here are a few links to people working in this space:

2) Funnel Filters
Every great music experience interface has to be attached to the ability to intuitively and rapidly funnel music.

Slicing, dicing and funneling music implies that music can be scored, ordered and sorted. The uniformed pushback I always get about filtering music is that somehow the process will force music into some sort of most-common denominator, homogenized hell. You can shelve that thought. Music can be scored, ranked, ordered and funneled against any song set you can imagine. If there’s a segment of the population that’s looking for sad country songs about love and war but not about dogs, that sort of sound like Kanye West and U2, then that’s where the user will begin his journey. Here are some of the ways songs can be scored:

Similarity scored - how completely similar is a song to all songs in a set (any set).
Sonic attributes scored - scored against certain sonic attributes such as melody or beat.
Emotional content scored - the highs and lows (topology) of a song or song segment as compared to all the songs or song segments in a set (used in synch licensing).
Market demand scored - songs are scored against hits.
Lyric content scored - the occurrences of lyrics compared to songs in a set.
Meta tag analysis scored - the occurrences of meta tags compared to songs in a set.
Sounds-alike scored - does a song sound like songs in a song set.
Market traction scored - scores based upon sales, shares, downloads and plays.
Professionally scored - as scored/rated by music industry professionals.
Crowd scored & social ‘friends’ scored - scores are crowd-sourced.
Price scored (free or not) and proximity scored (geographic measurement).

Once again, the ability to score and funnel music will be as simple as adjusting faders, dragging songs and waiving your controller. The user’s ability to chop through a mountain of music will only be limited by how fast his or her ears can process overlapping clips while visually subdividing a full screen of information.

3) Distributed & Cloud Computing
While some of this technology will be accessible through the browser, there’s a lot of it that will require the user to download and install an application. To leverage the power of your computer, to avoid the added costs and hassles of licensing the major label content that you already own, and to create the ultimate end-user experience, expect applications to process music and the user interfaces locally, while shifting processed songs and metadata in and out of the cloud. This bit of the pull-technology-kit may take the longest to reach consumers. However, I expect more than a few people within the music industry to be using much of what’s described here in 2009/2010 to locate the gems buried in the beach. (I’m also looking forward to the mix of music discovery and cloud computing options that Sun will be shopping over the next year or so.)

New Business Models Needed
Music is still going to be sold and music is going to be free. However, I expect pull music technology and propositions to further sponge up the disposable time that people can invest into music consumption. As I have said before, when you attach this stuff to a database of one or two million songs, everyone is going to find the stuff (music or the general music experience) they are looking for. Lots of new music will be discovered, which will further dilute the time people spend on mass-marked (pushed) music.

So, what are the behaviors that shift as we transition from push to pull?
Prior to Google nobody talked about adwords, adsense, search engine optimization (seo), search engine marketing (sem), relevancy, organic search results and things like link farms. The Pull Music Paradigm is going to birth its’ own set of similar verbs and practices that didn’t exist yesterday; here are a few to consider (A, B, C):

A - Song Data Manicuring
To enable the creators of Music Experience Interfaces to EASILY obtain (mine for) the information needed to funnel music in a myriad of ways, song owners will be driven to be the custodians of every statistic, analysis, review, tag and chunk of relevant data they can attach to their songs.

B - Song (Data) Planning
The song scoring and funneling methods described above are also a reflection of the trend analysis and trend visualization criteria that will be at the fingertips of just about anyone. Sixty minutes in front of a flat screen full of information will be telling for any songwriter or music industry professional. As sure as you believe that featuring a kazoo in your next song probably isn’t going to work, you’re going to quickly develop a sense for what will. Will this make music creation formulaic? No never. Anomalies and outliers are still going to bust trends every day. However, marketplace knowledge will be as accessible and usable as the repertoire of music knowledge any artist brings to the songwriting table.

C - Song Data Gaming and Validation
As sure as humans work to trick Google to gain higher organic search standings, there’s going to be song data optimizers that will attempt to profit from gaming the music funnels; it will be a cat and mouse game. And, just as Google tirelessly works at achieving relevancy (you usually get relevant information from Google), the creators of Music Experience Interfaces combined with the data aggregators will work to ensure that the music funnels are also accurate and relevant.

The End of Mass-Market Music Promotion
The result of music promotion can be summed up as something called market traction. Market traction is just one-way to score (measure) and funnel music. The visualization (the graph, the plot) of music that’s mass-marketed is going to be obviously different than the visualization of music that’s found using other funnel criteria and then genuinely promoted (recommended) by identifiable segments of the population. As long as there are record labels that still generate billions of revenue from music sales, traditional music promotion will continue. However for everyone else, music promotion is something that fans will do after they filter, find and discover new songs. Since the everyone-else method will be far more cost effective (now that the product is now 99 cents or less), enduring and visually perceptible, I predict plan that mass-market promotion will have a short shelf life.

I don't use Music Think Tank to overtly push my projects, just my ideas. However for the sake of credibility, I can tell you that Music Xray is where I am working on much of what I described in this post. Don't expect miracles. Music Xray is going to take two to three years to fully build.

Social objects for beginners [gapingvoid]

(author unknown) — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 03:45:47 -0800

Shared by David Jennings
Explaining social objects by example, and making them sound so loose and fuzzy that you wonder whether this concept is really going to help much...

The Social Object, in a nutshell, is the reason two people are talking to each other, as opposed to talking to somebody else. Human beings are social animals. We like to socialize. But if think about it, there needs to be a reason for it to happen in the first place. That reason, that "node" in the social network, is what we call the Social Object.

Blogging at work and the corporate attention economy

(author unknown) — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 03:33:10 -0800

Shared by David Jennings
Suggestive piece of research that seems to be saying that, if you invest time in blogging on your own time and for your purposes then you may accept the wild and unpredictable variations in attention that different bloggers get. But if you blog at work, you expect a more equitable distribution of attention and rewards. The authors conclude that the attention economy "appears to break down at work" -- or would it be fair to say that people expect a more controlled, meritocratic (social democratic? socialist?!) economy in the workplace?

The attention economy motivates participation in peer-produced sites on the Web like YouTube and Wikipedia. However, this economy appears to break down at work. We studied a large internal corporate blogging community using log files and interviews and found that employees expected to receive attention when they contributed to blogs, but these expectations often went unmet. Like in the external blogosphere, a few people received most of the attention, and many people received little or none. Employees expressed frustration if they invested time and received little or no perceived return on investment. While many corporations are looking to adopt Web-based communication tools like blogs, wikis, and forums, these efforts will fail unless employees are motivated to participate and contribute content. We identify where the attention economy breaks down in a corporate blog community and suggest mechanisms for improvement. To appear at CHI 2009.

Music Week - Midem: ISPs lead pack of music providers

(author unknown) — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 04:16:07 -0800

Shared by David Jennings
If this report is a fair representation of the research, it seems as though the research questions were a little odd. Do we really expect music fans to make judgements about whether ISPs are best placed to provide music services rather than TV or mobile providers? Surely the question they're really answering is where they think it makes most sense for their music bill to appear, and, because they get most music from the internet, they nominate their internet bill. Big deal. Billing and actual service provision may come from quite different providers, depending on how the services are bundled.

In the research conducted by The Leading Question and Music Ally in the UK, US and France, music fans overwhelmingly backed ISPs as their favoured music supplier when asked to choose amongst a variety of possible providers.

46% of the survey chose ISPs as their number one music service provider, compared to 10% preferring cable and satellite TV providers, 5% opting for mobile operators while a meagre 3% considered handset manufacturers best placed to deliver music to them.

ISPs were also rated top choice provider for unlimited music services, despite mobile operators and handset manufacturers already offering more of these services.

Apple, Tesco 'most to blame' for music biz crisis • The Register

(author unknown) — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 03:54:36 -0800

eMusic sales data supports 'long tail' theory [The Guardian]

(author unknown) — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 02:40:18 -0800

Shared by David Jennings
Chris Anderson has always pointed out that the long tail distribution depends in part on having good means to help people find the stuff down in the tail -- in his terms good 'filters', in mine good design for discovery. eMusic is interesting because its discovery mechanisms used to be not very good at all. They've got better with a redesign in the last year, and it would be interesting to see if the distribution of their sales has changed at all before/after that change.

The debate over music's "long tail" is shaping up to be an epic fight, with new data contradicting recent claims about song sales. eMusic has reported that 75% of its tracks were bought at least once in 2008, offering a counterpoint to the MCPS-PRS report that only 20% of songs on the internet ever sold a copy.

eMusic, which sells DRM-free songs through a subscription system, is one of the world's largest digital music retailers. Despite dealing only with independent labels, it has sold more than 250 million tracks since 2003.

The company has waded into an argument between Chris Anderson, editor in chief of Wired magazine, and Will Page and Andrew Bud, who authored a recent study into the sales of songs on the internet. Anderson coined the phrase "long tail" in a 2004 article, writing that a digital world would see the growth of niche products at the expense of mass market items. "The future of business", he wrote, "is selling less of more".

Page and Bud, meanwhile, found that when it came to songs, the internet had not significantly changed market distribution. They claimed that, as before, a small number of songs sold huge amounts, a larger number of songs sold medium amounts, and a huge number sold, well ... nothing at all.

eMusic's data seems to contradict this and back Anderson's theory. "eMusic is the Long Tail," Madeleine Milne, eMusic's managing director for Europe, said in a statement. Using both automated features and editorial content, eMusic highlights even the neglected corners of their catalogue, Milne said. "Our customers buy music beyond the mainstream Top 40 because we provide them with more context ... [and encourage] experimentation."

With a catalogue of five million songs, eMusic's data may actually refute Page and Bud's findings. If 75% of their five million songs sold at least one copy, that makes some 3,750,000 tracks. Page and Bud's research had found that only three million songs on the whole internet – and not just eMusic's catalogue – had sold any copies in 2008.

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Predicting the popularity of online content

(author unknown) — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 14:08:05 -0800

Shared by David Jennings
Research from HP Labs on a method for predicting popularity of items on Digg and YouTube: the latter seems to have a longer tail (at least in terms of time).

We present a method for accurately predicting the long time popularity of online content from early measurements of user access. Using two content sharing portals, Youtube and Digg, we show that by modeling the accrual of views and votes on content offered by these services we can predict the long-term dynamics of individual submissions from initial data. In the case of Digg, measuring access to given stories during the first two hours allows us to forecast their popularity 30 days ahead with remarkable accuracy, while downloads of Youtube videos need to be followed for 10 days to attain the same performance. The differing time scales of the predictions are shown to be due to differences in how content is consumed on the two portals: Digg stories quickly become outdated, while Youtube videos are still found long after they are initially submitted to the portal. We show that predictions are more accurate for submissions for which attention decays quickly, whereas predictions for evergreen content will be prone to larger errors.

Should the New Law of Music Absorption alter your music business decisions?

(author unknown) — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 14:06:02 -0800

Shared by David Jennings
Interesting speculation (I can't see any evidence that it's based on) about the stages of music discovery, including at what point 'old' discoveries get displaced by 'new' ones.

Music absorption is the process that occurs between music discovery and the (self) conversion of an average music consumer into an active fan.

I believe the music absorption process is radically different now than it was just two years ago, and understanding how this process has changed should impact your approach to succeeding in the music industry.

The New Law of Music Absorption
Consumers are rapidly accumulating vast libraries of songs from around the globe at unprecedented rates. As a consequence, the speed (the time) that it takes the average consumer to absorb new music is increasing proportionately.

Music Absorption - From Average Consumer to Paying Fan
That rate at which consumers absorb songs varies. Absorption rates depend on the song, the song's genre and on the song's natural demographic.

Stage 1 - Artist Discovery: This post is about music adsorption, and not about how early adopters discover your presence on the Internet; for the sake of this discussion, they just do. For music to be absorbed, it has to be found one way or another. Create >> promote >> discover >> absorb, will become: create >> filter >> absorb. This will happen in the near future, but that's a subject for another day.

Stage 2 - Rapid Review: Like it or not, billions of songs are being sold and downloaded by consumers that only review 20 to 30 seconds of a song. Moreover, confident music fans (they know what they like) can scrub though a song and make a consumption decision in 10 seconds or less using the scrub bar on any music player.

Stage 3 - Playlist Installation: After rapid review, songs are installed into playlists. Statistics show that music collections and playlists have grown substantially over the last 36 months, and this trend is only growing. A song may have to tumble around a playlist (set on random shuffle) for months before it moves into the next stages.

Stage 4 - The Substitution Challenge: Consumers are rapidly acquiring vast quantities of songs now - legally and not. To obtain multiple p-spins, which are spins within the portable/personal devices owned by music consumers, your song has to compete with every other song in the playlist and/or on the device. Every song is only a button press away from being substituted for another song that's equally interesting and probably free.

Note: On my blog I have written about how vast quantities of songs coupled to recommendation engines are a far greater revenue subtraction problem than file sharing ever was. I refer to this problem as the Substitution Dilemma.

Stage 5 - Who Sings That Song? After obtaining multiple p-spins, consumers begin to connect the dots. A mental note or a physical act is made to move a song into heavy (p-spin) rotation, or to plop your song into a playlist designated as tolerable background noise, or to just trash your song all together.

Stage 6 - Public Proclamation: This is the stage where fans of new music test out their taste-making ability on friends or within a social setting (online and offline). I suspect that this stage is far more important to younger music fans than it is to confident music fans. In addition, this is the stage where others also discover new songs (go back to stage one).

Stage 7 - Imprinting: Someone said: "Songs are like memory sponges." Memories and shared memories become forever tied to songs. However today's consumers listen to a broad selection of music; seemingly delivered through anything that runs on electricity - from video games to mobile phones, consumers have more listening options than ever. As a consequence, imprinting is spread out over more songs, the impressions are probably shallower, the shared imprints are probably less frequent (think five friends with five iPods all in the same car), and the imprinting opportunity is spread over a longer timeline (consider today's 15 year-olds imprinting on Led Zeppelin for example).

Stage 8 - Meaningful Patronage: Unless you have a truckload of money, you are relying on organic growth to convert numerous listeners into paying fans. Organic growth outside of the geographic areas where you perform is only going to happen (globally) when your songs have made it through the absorption gauntlet (funnel). On the other side of absorption, you should have name recognition, perhaps an email address tied to the fan or an RSS subscribe (better), the untapped willingness to attend a show, and probably even the inclination (from the fan) to purchase something that you're selling.

Stage 9 - Rock Star Reoccurring Revenue - The music absorption process is taking longer than ever; competition (within devices) is increasing; legitimate substitution (fueled by recommendation technology) is a button-press away; and imprinting frequency is falling. It's a lot harder to become a rock star capable of generating reoccurring revenue from music. Consumers are going to try just about every song before they buy you and/or your music. In addition, the entire process can take many years instead of a few.

Advice and Conclusion
Outside of what a smart record label with a lot of promotion money (contradiction?) can do for an artist, it seems to me that nothing can have more impact on the absorption process and the desire to achieve success, than to have an evenly paced plan and a vision to make lots of great songs over numerous years. Most artists don't have enough money or time in the day to alter the process with DIY promotion in a meaningful (financially material) way; they have to do it with music. Even if you had the support of a label, you would flame out of the funnel if the quality and consistency of your music didn't exceed the gravity of your promotion.

In short, you should be trying to persuade everyone around you to believe in a five to ten year plan, anything less is probably doomed to fail. If you are relying on organic growth, you have to reconcile your plan with the absorption patterns that are typical of the fans within your genre and niche.

Support Longplayer Live

Wed, 31 Dec 2008 10:12:16 -0800

To the Trinity Buoy Wharf lighthouse today for the annual visit to the Longplayer 1,000 year composition by Jem Finer/Artangel. In 02006's post I commented that some of the things we had hoped might happen that year had not come to pass. In this year's photo, evidence that patience was rewarded on at least one count.

The guy in the photo will have his name engraved on bowl number 1.01 in next September's live performance of Longplayer, and I believe I was also the first person to sponsor a (different) bowl and reserve a ticket at the performance. Please consider doing the same via this page. While you're at it,if you're in or near London, you may also want to join the Long Now London meetup group — it's free. Wishing you all the best for 02009.

Amazing New Centre for Learning

Tessy — Sun, 30 Nov 2008 09:15:57 -0800

The Centre for Real-World Learning opened last month at the University of Winchester. The Centre is being led by Professor Guy Claxton and Professor Bill Lucas whose mission is to find out more about how people can be helped to get better at learning whatever it is they want to learn.

Their examples of Real World Learning include:

Investigating: gathering and testing information and ideas Experimenting: trying things out in practice; drafting and redrafting Controlled imagining: running mental simulations and rehearsals Receptive imagining: allowing possibilities to incubate and ‘bubble up’ into consciousness Reasoning: thinking things through, planning and goal-setting, analysing arguments and evaluating progress Resourcing: creating and capitalising on a network of tools and resources Collaborating: engaging, sharing and discussing with others

What a welcome addition to the educational landscape!

Social media old and new: two contrasting networks

Sun, 30 Nov 2008 08:59:34 -0800

It's a year since I did a 'compare and contrast' blog post about two initiatives to build networking activity. To recap briefly, the RSA is a 254-year-old membership organisation devoted to art, design, business and the environment, currently with around 28,000 'fellows', which launched a Networks initiative on 22 November 02007 (I didn't go). The Social Media Café (a.k.a. Tuttle Club, named after Harry Tuttle), on the other hand, had its very first meeting on 21 November last year, and I did go. It aims to create spaces where people interested in social media can connect, socially and for business. So far, that has involved a series of weekly café sessions, which are 'prototypes' for something that may be more far-reaching. (The picture on the right shows, Lloyd Davis, Tuttle Club prime mover, making a brief announcement at the first birthday meeting nine days ago.)

One year on, how are they each doing? Where do they converge and diverge?

Let me see if I can build up some dramatic tension here, to make it into a good story. Is the Tuttle Club the 21st century analogue of coffee house meetings that led to the formation of the RSA in 01754? Will the RSA be shown up as a lumbering beast of the 18th century, unable to move quickly or be flexible because of all its baggage, so that the Tuttlers can run rings round it? Or will the Tuttle Club turn out to be a typical Web 2.0 phenomenon, supported by an initial wave of enthusiasm and attention but zero revenue, and at risk from the capricious mood of its freelance participants, who will lose interest when stronger commitments are required of them, or when they (errr, we) finally have to resort to getting proper jobs?

Now let me deflate that tension straight away. In both cases, it's far too soon to say. And anyway, there's no competition here. A small number of us happily frequent both spaces, and symbiotic co-evolution would be an ideal outcome for both initiatives. (Yeah, OK, I know: wouldn't it always?)

So having told you the punchline, here are a few 'compare and contrast' notes to record a snapshot of where things are at the end of the first year. This is a subjective, largely impressionistic and annoyingly London-centric account. I haven't gone back and re-read everything that's been produced — which in the case of RSA is about 40 times what has been written about Tuttle — though I have recently made my way through most of the NESTA-commissioned evalution of the RSA Networks project. To disclose my interests and affiliations, I am a fellow of the RSA and have no official status with the Tuttle Club (but then neither does anyone much). In terms of participation, in both cases I would say I am on the dividing line between centre and periphery, but leaning towards the periphery, as is my wont.

RSA	Tuttle Club (Social Media Cafe)
Matthew Taylor, Chief Executive of the RSA, has nailed his colours to the mast with the Networks project, one of the organisation's major initiatives since he took over two years ago. He's outlined his vision many times over in person and in writing (including, by coincidence, a blog post with exactly the same title as mine of a year ago, posted on the very same day). He's emphasised that this is a long-term commitment. When things are looking good for any group endeavour, everyone believes in collective responsibility; when delays or anxieties creep in, they look for a fall guy.	Lloyd Davis kicked off the Social Media Café concept and remains the main man, with the support of a few volunteers. Lloyd maintains that the sessions so far have been 'prototypes'. He makes arrangements such as the one with the ICA and continues to explore possibilities for leasing some workspace in Central London for club members to use.
The RSA received £100,000 funding from NESTA, probably topped up from the RSA's own funds (particularly for staff salaries) for the Networks project (source). This includes free wine and snacks at several events, which I've enjoyed.	£200 was raised for organisational development/incorporation (source). Apart from that there have been the costs of coffee, croissants and, until the club moved to the ICA a couple of months ago, pub room hire, paid for by sponsors or participants (about £300 per week).
A lot of time, money and effort has gone into building online infrastructure — the networks platform — to help incubate civic innovation projects, and enable fellows to contact and collaborate with each other. This started with some textbook prototyping and piloting with plenty of user involvement, but the danger of evolutionary systems is that they become hard to maintain. A re-engineered system has just been launched.	The tech infrastructure is very lightweight. There is just a wiki for the Social Media Café, a blog, plus an infrequently used email list. All are free hosted services. There's still a Facebook group, though no one uses those any more, right?
Alongside the networks platform, there has been — since the initiative was first mooted and before it launched — a shadow space for commentary and discussion, comprising an unofficial blog, a wiki, an email list and a Facebook group. Each of these has gone for long periods with no action, but while some may have outlived their usefulness, others (the wiki and email list recently) spring back to life at times of activity or debate. A lot has been written by RSA fellows trying to tease out what it is that we want out of the initiative (and to what degree that's the same as what the RSA wants as an institution).	You can never be sure that there aren't lots of conversations you're missing out on — especially as most take place on Twitter — but the Tuttle Club seems much less racked by anxieties about its identity. Participants talk about things it could do, for sure, but these discussions don't turn into soul-searching about who has the legitimacy to do what. In some ways, it's paradoxical that the organisation that's a year old has fewer identity issues than one that's a quarter of a millennium old, but that's baggage for you — and if the Tuttle Club ever has as much money to spend as the RSA, identity issues will surely surface.
There's an ongoing uncertainty about the constitution and ownership of the RSA Networks project [link requires registration]. This is most evident in the mutual perceptions of RSA staff and fellows. Whose job is it to initiate, whose to support and develop what has been initiated? In the face of confusion, each side may look suspiciously at the other… then it emerges that there are probably differences of opinion within each side, and little clusters of association emerge across the divide.	The constitution of the Tuttle Club is a work in progress. In this case it's both transparent — read the ideas and the accounts — and a bit messy.
The scale of active participation in the two initiatives feels, subjectively, similar. (I only see those who are active online or at meetings in London, remember.) For the RSA that amounts to a tiny proportion of the fellowship — but that can't be construed as a sign of failure. We know that in any voluntaristic network complex dynamics are at play between a very small but active core, a mainly reactive minority, and a mainly passive majority. One of the interesting things is that, while the RSA fellowship includes many people in responsible positions in leading public and private sector organisations, the active core seems to comprise almost exclusively independent and freelance professionals like me — again, the ones without proper jobs.	The number of people who've come to at least one Tuttle Club meeting is probably (high) three figures; the number who've come more than three times is (high?) two figures. As a percentage of social media professionals in and around London, those numbers may not be far off the RSA's participation rate. It's a truism to say it, but something like the Tuttle Club lives or dies by the quality and range of people it attracts. Lloyd Davis is not interested in growth for its own sake. Five years ago, I met some great people through the Ecademy network, but now I and all the people I'm still in touch with have abandoned it as it became swamped by life coaches, independent financial advisers and huckster entrepreneurs all pitching 'opportunities' at you. Lloyd writes of the "clueless opportunists [who] come looking for an easy opportunity, ironically there are a multitude of easy opportunities on offer, but they, being clueless, don't see the opportunities for what they are, they go away and leave us to get on with it." Long may this dynamic continue. There are a mix of shared values emerging. Yes, some might start talking about Brand Identity 2.0 at the Tuttle Club, but, if they do, I won't be the only one rolling my eyes (well, I'll be the only one rolling my eyes, but… you get what I mean).
Being a longstanding institution, and part of the Establishment, brings advantages as well as baggage. Powerful, or famous, or aspiring-to-be-powerful-and-famous people think it's the right place to be seen — or at least return calls. So do funding agencies. If you make a mess of things, you probably will get a second chance. Whereas a start-up like the Tuttle Club would be cast aside and replaced by someone else starting from scratch. The social capital may not be have much liquidity, but it's there. It's no wonder that progress seems to come in fits and starts, and will probably continue that way.	My hunch is that the Tuttle Club is quite delicately poised right now. It has registered on the radar of more established organisations like the ICA and NESTA, but it's a sensitive moment when one of these beckons to a fresh, young, still-to-be-incorporated venture, "come, let us take you under our wing…" Thankfully they appear to have the good sense to avoid any explicit quid pro quo or other meddling

I told you my conclusion before I started writing these comparisons. The writing turned out longer than I expected: turning these points over hasn't fundamentally changed how I thing, though I've felt both warmth and frustration towards both. One penny that finally dropped was that I've made more good friendships with people in, and adjoining, my fields of interest over the past year than at any time since I moved to London — and all are involved in one or other or both of these networks. The enjoyable conversations I've had with them have informed almost all of what I've written, though I take responsibility for the quirky opinions and any misrepresentations (hoping that friends may correct me).

I hope the next year is as fertile and as much fun. I'll let you know.

My five mind apples

Fri, 28 Nov 2008 09:59:07 -0800

Mindapples is a social movement to promote individual self-management of mental wellbeing. The original “5-a-day” campaign encouraged people to take care of their physical health through simple daily activities, and we want to do the same thing for mental health. We aim to create a stigma-free public debate about mental wellbeing, simply by asking everybody the question: “What’s your five-a-day?” [source]

Mindapples was conceived by the very smart Andy Gibson (also one of the School Of Everything team), and he has cheekily blogtagged me to get me to publish my five-a-day.

This comes with the warning that my mind feels fairly badly inspissated at the moment, but that may be because I've not been getting all five sufficiently regularly.

Meditation, or bathing a baby. Best to get the most embarrassing out of the way first. I've tried different types of meditation, guided either by tapes of Alan Watts or by the Meditation Trust. However, there are other methods if you don't want to come on like a new age hippy. In his Autobiographical Statement, John Cage wrote of his practice of zen buddhism, "I have never practiced sitting cross-legged nor do I meditate. My work is what I do and always involves writing materials, chairs, and tables. Before I get to it, I do some exercises for my back and I water the plants, of which I have around two hundred." A film shown at the John Cage Uncaged weekend documents this enormous array of plants above 6th Avenue, and the intricate instructions for watering them — you wouldn't have wanted to apartment-sit for him. Since I became a dad, finding time to meditate has been harder, but in its place I have the evening bath, feed and bedtime of my four-month-old son: the arrangements of bath water and thermometer, sleep suit and dummy, hot water bottle and towel, feeding bottle and LP cued up on turntable, not to mention the actual washing routine, are almost on a par with Cage's plants.

Daily rituals. Every day, I take a picture — the same picture — of our garden. You can see 503 (and counting) of them on Flickr. I know others do a similar thing with photos of themselves, but this intended to be an antidote to worrying about my self-image; to help me lose myself in my environment. Another ritual, though this may be more of a mind cigarette (alternately thrilling and sickening) than a mind apple, is listening to a different item in my music collection and writing something about it. Mark McGuinness has written insightfully about rituals (and avoiding the mundane) recently.
Trying to absorb something from someone who seems to have a more alert mind than me. Mark McGuinness is a good example of this, too, as I discovered his blogs at Lateral Action and Wishful Thinking a couple of months, and pick up lots of ideas and tips there. I rotate my current favourites every now and then — though I have a few perennials such as Tom Phillips, whose work teeters on the brink of tipping over from inspiring into intimidating.
Being prepared to zone out. Which might sound the same as #1, but in this case it's not planned; it's accepting the opportunity to take a little cognitive time out when it presents itself. Yesterday afternoon, for example, I ate a rather dense, home-baked muffin, and initially regretted it as I felt the blood drain from my brain to my stomach to work on my digestion. Next I had to catch a train into central London, where the combination of my light-headedness, a sunset in the south west shedding light on dark rainclouds overhead, and the swoonsome first album by The Clientele on my headphones, swept me away. I didn't do the reading I meant to do, but I arrived refreshed and alert to new possibilities.
Exercise. I'll end with a no-brainer (whoops, sorry). "Exercise promotes new cell growth in old brains by increasing their blood volume, and cell growth improves memory," says a recent book on memory research. This most obvious mindapple is the one I fall down on most often, since I now live in a part of London where the only way to get anywhere interesting is by train.

Andy invites me to pass on the invitation to five 'blog friends' to do the same. If you're a blog friend of mine… consider yourself spared, because I'm almost as sceptical about these tagging 'memes' as I am of emails that exhort me to forward them on to everyone in my address book. And by refusing to tag others, I retain the right the ignore being tagged if I choose.

Links for 2008-11-26 [del.icio.us]

Thu, 27 Nov 2008 00:00:00 PST

Steve Lawson on social media for independent musicians
An album and some social media advice from independent jazz musician Steve Lawson

Steve Lawson on social media for independent musicians

DJ — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 14:47:03 -0800

I went to London's Vortex Jazz Club on Monday to catch the launch gig for the new Lawson/Dodds/Wood album, Numbers (pictured left, with guest sax player, Mark Lockheart). The thing is, I'd already had the album in digital form for a month or two — and not (a) because I nabbed a leaked copy off the net, or (b) because band member Steve Lawson (centre of photo) is a friend of mine. I paid the advertised price.

In a move reminiscent of the recent David Byrne & Brian Eno album, a digital download version was available in advance of the CD release. Advance buyers of the download were also entitled to the CD — I picked up mine at the Vortex — and got a further 45 minutes of exclusive material (the unedited improvisations from which the album was constructed) into the bargain. Anyone who's just curious can stream the album in full on Steve's site (via Last.fm).

Byrne & Eno got support from Topspin Media, one of the new wave of net-savvy, post-label music intermediaries, in managing the album release. Steve Lawson, however, adds the roles of label owner, social media man-about-town, and bass teacher to that of musician. I think I'm right in saying he's never put out an album other than on his own label, and generally aims to break even, at least, by the release date. He's put more thought into the uses of Twitter for building an audience than anyone I know: follow him @solobasssteve. In fact his ideas are so good that he once, after drinking a few beers in a famous producer's studio, claimed that I'd plagiarised them. Judge for yourself by checking his Social Media Principles for Musicians Parts 1, 2 and (I think?) 3 (hint: check the dates on these posts).

Lest anyone worry that, following in the wake of this album plug, this blog is turning into backslapping promos, the 'good' news is that I only have two friends who are career musicians.

[Update 30 November 2008: #1 Ouch! I knew that was a dangerous thing to say. I forgot Ben Walker. Ben, Ben, I'm sorry — I definitely owe you a plug, now!

#2 And I forgot about the tearable web, so below are the Lawson/Dodds/Wood album and one of my favourite of Ben's songs.]

Photo credit for Lawson/Dodds/Wood: © Cat Munro, 2008, used with permission.

Fighting cultural surplus: a review of Bill Drummond's 17

Thu, 13 Nov 2008 12:39:30 -0800

When Brian Eno released his Generative Music 1 album — music that is created 'on the fly' by a computer following a set of rules that Eno programmed, released on floppy disk, and now virtually unplayable on any current hardware — he wrote "I really think it is possible that our grandchildren will look at us in wonder and say: 'you mean you used to listen to exactly the same thing over and over again?'".

If you were feeling mean, you might classify a strand of Bill Drummond's musical output as an agitprop popularisation of some of Eno's ideas. 17 fits that profile, as Drummond wants to play his part in getting rid of recorded music and perhaps not just recorded music. "Imagine waking up tomorrow, all music has disappeared," begins one of his many manifestos. He declares Year Zero in the history of music, razing what has gone before and starting again — and all of this single-handedly, or with a bit of help from some travelling companions and some yet-to-be-convinced schoolchildren.

What's interesting about the campaign Drummond conjures in 17 is that it re-interprets the current state of the recording industry not as a commercial crisis, but as a cultural one.

recorded music has run its course, it has been mined out. It is so 20th century, like paper money and fossil fuels… all (or should that be 99.99 percent?) of music being written, composed, created [is] done to be recorded, and once recorded, to be experienced in a very limited way.

The first hundred or so pages are carried by Drummond's commitment to asking the basic-but-necessary questions and articulating his discontent:

What is music for? And why do we listen to it in the way that we do? And what would it be like if…? But the big questions seemed to be 'Why am I so frustrated with it?' and 'Why do I want it to be something other than it is?' and 'Why do I want it to exist in some other sort of way than it already does?'

One of the causes of the frustration is the simple ubiquity, the super-abundance of recorded music in the 21st century. This is something I've touched on intermittently on this blog over the last four years: the diseases of affluence that mean that we throw away more recorded music than we used to own a generation ago; the other critics who have reported feelings close to nausea from over-listening, and the research indicating that "accessibility and choice has arguably led to a rather passive attitude towards music heard in everyday life"; and one of Drummond's own antidotes in the form of No Music Day (which is coming around for the fourth time next week).

17 goes into more detail about No Music Day, but the main strategy he explores and documents in the book is the one that provides its title. Drummond writes a number of poster scores to be performed by ensembles of 17 people, who mostly have not met before, in different configurations, using only their voices. These performances are recorded and played just once, and then the recording is destroyed.

The first third of the book also explains what's behind these scores, for example in terms of Drummond's love of choral music (like Arvo Pärt's), and clarifies that, no, really, he'd never heard of Cornelius Cardew, Fluxus or Stockhausen before other people pointed out the similarities between his work and theirs — but since this has now been drawn to his attention, he's looked into their work, and it is indeed good stuff.

Drummond loves to tease with this kind of self-mythologising, slyly putting his work in the context of avant-garde pioneers while claiming to arrived at the same place independently, and daring us to accuse him of stretching the truth (I know art colleges did little traditional teaching of art history in the '70s, but don't you pick this stuff up through osmosis and natural curiosity? As a science student, I'm sure I knew about all those people by the age of 22).

This is quite fun (if not quite in the same class as the personal stories in Drummond's wonderful 45) but the mythologising is really all that carries the last 250 or so pages of the book. It adds spice to the musical autobiography and the diary of different performances of the 17 scores — which is just as well, because the number of new ideas about music tails off dramatically, and these stories would be pretty dry without Drummond's nagging chutzpah (or as the director of a gallery and music festival calls it, "high jinx"). He loves to make a grand claim and then expose his insecurities about it. At times, he can't seem to help himself: expressing a compulsion to graffiti, literally, his 'notices' at the side of major roads; being convicted for driving while banned — and then displaying the brilliant resilience to enjoy his sentence of 60 hours community service digging ditches, described as "good honest hard work… just what you need to get fit and get your head clear for serious thinking."

Drummond also takes evident pleasure in quoting, approvingly, an email that concludes by summing up all his work as "raving narcissism". "Well, I suppose it is all about me," is his rejoinder. Elsewhere, the device of having multiple voices commenting, challenging and contradicting the author seems a bit tired and conventional these days, but at the end I found myself nodding in relieved agreement with the critique of the 17 project that is attributed to Drummond's long-time cohort, Dave Balfe; in particular, "if you had been using a modicum of self-discipline you could have got it all down to a 2,000 word essay". Balfe goes on to argue that Drummond's professed desire to "accept the contradictions" in his work is not a sign of great art so much as lack of discipline and rigour.

I say "attributed to" Balfe because, in common with one of the other paratextual commentators in the book, I suspect these criticisms are largely Drummond's own, a reflexive doubling of his acceptance of contradictions.

If so, I'm tempted to reply that you and I have been through that, and this is not our fate, so let us not talk falsely now.

The truth is it's not just music that is suffering the problems of cultural surplus. The palate gets jaded when the stomach is already sated. How much is the world crying out for another blog post about another book about another possible future for music?

At the heart of 17, what binds the ideas to the autobiography is a struggle to break the cycle of just producing more of everything; to make culture new, fresh and strange again. The book seems to concede failure in that grand ambition, but in so doing it reinforces the value of that ambition. No wonder Brian Eno has a copy on his shelf.

Links for 2008-10-09 [del.icio.us]

Fri, 10 Oct 2008 00:00:00 PDT

Participation and influence in social media
Reviewing and updating different classifications of user participation in social media, and different models of influence - but most models of complex systems can only be tentative

Participation and influence in social media

DJ — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 06:01:35 -0700

This post is a little update on one of themes I explored in the book concerning how people are different in the levels of commitment, participation and influence they bring to discovering culture. I started out with some market research about different kinds of music fans: "Savants", "Enthusiasts", "Casuals" and "Indifferents" (see full post about this classification). It doesn't seem far-fetched to imagine that some similar gradation of interest occurs in most, if not all, other fields. But then I speculated that this classification might map onto the different kinds of participation in social media proposed by Bradley Horowitz, where he distinguised

Creators — 1% of the user population might start a group (or a thread within a group)
Synthesisers — 10% of the user population might participate actively, and actually author content whether starting a thread or responding to a thread-in-progress
Consumers — 100% of the user population benefits from the activities of the above groups (lurkers)

And then I went further and speculated about mapping that onto the distinction that some marketers make between advocates/influencers, 'brand adorers' and 'brand adopters'.

I mentioned in the book that it was questionable whether a pyramid is always the right way to represent these classifications. It implies a very top-down, one-way dynamic of influence. Intuition and everyday experience suggests that life isn't like that, and I gave examples of the most committed music fans being influenced indirectly by the more casual fans (Lord save us from being thought to share mainstream tastes!). But everyone seems to use pyramids to show influence, and that's the bit that stuck, while my nuanced caveats got forgotten. It still haunts me, which is why I have to write blog 'updates' like this…

But what prompted the return of this spectre was a couple of recent blog posts on participation and influence. First, Jay Cross shared the six levels of participation — represented as a ladder this time — identified by Jeremiah Owyang, a Forresters analyst:

Creators
Critics
Collectors
Joiners
Spectators, and
Inactives

Forresters' research leads them to distinguish different distributions of these six types between different age groups and between different continents. But for no population do the Creators count for less than 10%, which shows they're not using the terms the same way as Horowitz (see Jay's post for their definition).

The second post was one of Mark Earls' frequent broadsides about the nature of influence.

We see influence (what folk do to each other on our behalf) where emulation (of what folk around us are doing) is the real mechanic behind the spread of human behaviour.

We've just got the wrong end of the stick: we humans are not a species of "influential" individuals but emulators — Homo Mimickus. Like most social creatures, but more so…

He's right, of course — that's one reason why the pyramid is wrong. But saying there is no elite of massively influential people whom the rest of us follow slavishly is one thing (you'd have to swallow Malcolm Gladwell hook, line and sinker — and rather misguidedly — to believe that). It would be another thing to deny that some people are more influential than others. In Mark's terms, some people inspire emulation more than others.

And just as committed fans can be counter-influenced by the mainstream, as I suggested above, there can also be anti-emulation or counter-mimicry. One reason we haven't all emulated SUV drivers, even when we could, is that we'd like to make it clear that we're a completely different species from them.

Where does all this leave us? We're dealing with complex systems, and patterns of social dynamics that are impossible to visualise accurately. Don't get hung up on the classifications — are there three, four, six or 26? Answer: none of the above. If anyone tells you their research shows the true answer, ignore them, because they've misunderstood the whole field. Is participation and influence in social media properly represented as a pyramid, a ladder, a network or an octopus? Answer: none of the above.

But it can be useful to simplify — as long as you remember that's what you're doing. In sub-atomic physics electrons' position relative to the nucleus is a probability wave. Hardly anyone can visualise a probability wave, so we imagine the electrons orbiting the nucleus like planets orbiting the sun. That's a false picture, but it's satisfying, and sometimes it can even be useful. It gives us just enough confidence to go on.

Links for 2008-10-08 [del.icio.us]

Thu, 09 Oct 2008 00:00:00 PDT

Mufin.com: content-based recommendations
Announcing a new music recommender system that can be embedded in MySpace profiles. It's recommendations are based on automated analysis of acoustic fingerprints of tracks.

Mufin.com: content-based recommendations

DJ — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 09:00:00 -0700

I get a fair number of people approaching me to tell me that their music recommender system is the best because of [insert special secret sauce here]. Usually this doesn't go much further: after all, the sauce is secret and can't be shared; so I say I'll be interested to keep in touch with their progress, and I bite my lip to resist repeating my sceptical view that any recommender system only has to be good enough to keep people coming back for more recommendations.

In the case of Berlin-based mufin.com, launching in private beta today, the story is slightly different, as they sent me all their publicity release information, and Petar Djekic was willing to talk to me on the record as it were. They even gave me an invite code to give away — that's my disclosure out of the way!

Mufin.com grew out of the Fraunhofer Institute, also the birthplace of the MP3 format, and the technically interesting part of what they're doing builds on that strong research base in audio and acoustics. What mufin.com does is known as content-based filtering rather than collaborative user-based filtering. In other words, rather than saying "people who like this artist/song also like this artist/song", it says "this song is similar in important ways to this song, so if you like one, you may like the other". Or in other words, think more like Pandora than Last.fm.

Mufin.com's secret sauce is that they analyse tracks automatically, and extract 40 characteristics for each one. So whereas Pandora's human-driven analysis is labour-intensive, mufin.com's can quite easily scale up to enormous numbers of tracks, just by throwing more computing power at them. (Other services that use this automated acoustic fingerprinting as the basis for recommendations include the MusicIP Mixer and AMG's Tapestry — see my interview with AMG's Zac Johnson.) [Update, 8 October 2008: Zac corrects me, pointing out that while AMG's LASSO technology does automated song recognition, this is not used for the recommendations in Tapestry, which are informed by human analysis more akin to Pandora.]

Pandora's analysis is based on literally hundreds of attributes, which, according to Wikipedia, make very fine-grained distinctions between, for example, "Lyrics by a Famous Rap Artist", "Lyrics by a Rap Icon" and "Lyrics by a Respected Rap Artist". Petar Djekic explained that mufin.com's characteristics are determined from mathematical, rather than critical/aesthetic, analysis — so while some of the 40 dimensions map clearly onto culturally established terms like vocals, harmony, and tempo, some are 'purely statistical', which means there is no simple way of naming them without inventing new terms.

Petar argues that recommender systems that work just at artist level are often ineffective. If someone says they like David Bowie, what should you recommend to them? Something that sounds like Hunky Dory or Low? Tin Machine?! I tried different starting points for Neil Young recommendations. I started with Young's Southern Man, a guitar-heavy song, which turned out to be a dead end: "Sorry, no tracks similar to Southern man available". So I switched to Young's soft piano ballad, Philadelphia. Startlingly, the majority of the recommendations were piano-led classical lieder. But, yes, I could discern a similarity to Philadelphia, even if these pieces had little or no connection to the rest of Young's oeuvre — and I might even have liked them if I'd had a chance to see more. I tried again on the guitar angle with Rockin' in the Free World. There must be some glitches in mufin.com's metadata because I was recommended a version of the same song by The Alarm, but on listening to the 30-second sample it was evidently Neil Young himself.

Yes, 30-second samples. Petar told me that the mufin.com team is sticking to the competences they know best, and not entering the music licensing minefield at the moment. Which is understandable, and possibly a wise move, but what does it mean for their service? As I've argued before, the user experience of hopping between 30-second samples of multiple tracks is not a satisfying one. You'd have to be a hardcore music forager to put up with it (even with my professional interest, I don't think I've ever lasted more than ten minutes on such a service).

Therefore the most promising applications of mufin.com seem to me to be, first, licensing their recommender technology. Petar told me that their Software Developer Kits work cross-platform (though the downloadable Mufin MusicFinder app is Windows-only for the foreseeable future), and licensing is an avenue they will be exploring actively. The second route is embedding the music recommender application in other sites: Petar talked me through a demo of using Mufin embedded in a MySpace profile, and it was impressive how the full functionality was available while still retaining reasonable usability (in my short experience of it). According to the media release, users can also share new discoveries with friends in their social network.

Links for 2008-10-06 [del.icio.us]

Tue, 07 Oct 2008 00:00:00 PDT

Fan culture and public service: media versus broadcasting
A few comments on some research into fan cultures around radio, commissioned by BBC Radio Labs

Fan culture and public service: media versus broadcasting

DJ — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 09:21:00 -0700

All through last week the smart people at BBC Radio Labs published a series of research summaries under the heading "fan cultures in radio".

The research projects covered different forms of fan participation around radio, from message boards, listeners to an avuncular breakfast DJ, and a long-running soap opera. The one I was waiting for — and which will possibly be of most interest to readers of this blog — was the relationship between 'specialist' music programmes and fans, by Andrew Dubber and Tim Wall.

The published summary doesn't give us much reporting of the actual behaviour of specialist music fans (any chance of a fuller account being made available, I wonder?), but focuses on the range of orientations of the BBC to meeting the needs of these fans:

Drawing on our examination of the fan activities of specialist music enthusiasts, and the way BBC staff who serve their interests conceive their professional practices, we think such a shift would allow discussion of the difference between a 'one-to-many', centre-to-receptive-audience model and the 'many-to-many' forms of communication that are more typical online. More to the point, the term 'broadcasting' pretty much just means radio and television, when in fact recorded popular music is a media form in itself.

Elsewhere Andrew Dubber expands on the different orientations among BBC staff:

If you're the kind of music radio person with a broadcast orientation, all the internet is to you is a bigger transmitter. Or it’s a kind of a trap that you lay out there in the world, and when people stumble into it, you can grab them and pull them in to your broadcast programming.

If you have more of an online orientation, you may consider the medium on its own terms, but may not be making the most of the music programming which, if your station is doing anything right, is where all the real action is.

The trick is to step outside both of those frames and consider your station as a media organisation in a broader sense.

I'm intrigued as well about the range of orientations of the fans themselves, such as those who create a website for the aforementioned avuncular DJ's listeners. I'd guess that they don't think in media/broadcasting terms at all; their activities and orientation are much more intuitive (not having a 90-year institutional legacy behind them). But relying on intuition does not mean they are all homogeneous in their approach. Usually it means the opposite. So how do they self-organise in support of — and sometimes in conflict with — the country's most embedded media organisation?

Plugging Claire Tchaikowski's new album

DJ — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 09:45:52 -0700

Please excuse a brief promotional post on behalf of a friend. I first met Claire Tchaikowski almost exactly a year ago after she agreed to give a response to my talk at the RSA. I gave her a copy of my book; she gave me a copy of her still unmastered first album. Claire was originally signed to Sony-BMG, and has had 'interest' from two other major labels. But for now she's going it alone, and her album is released today on iTunes (256 kbps, no DRM) via Artists Without a Label. You can also hear one of the tracks in full on Last.fm. I'm not under any illusions that this blog is on the radar of music tastemakers, but am just chipping in my personal recommendation to anyone who might lend an ear. Quote me on this: you'll like Claire more than Dido. And if you're in London, she's supporting Luka Bloom in three weeks' time.

Links for 2008-09-26 [del.icio.us]

Sat, 27 Sep 2008 00:00:00 PDT

The professionalisation of amateur fan production
A scenario from the first draft of my book, which explores the workflow of a team of amateur fans as they build and catalogue resources about their favourite band, and the debates they have about engaging with commercial interests.

Why the net won't turn us all into social isolationists

Wed, 24 Sep 2008 14:05:26 -0700

Last year Cass Sunstein produced a revised version of his book Republic.com, titled — with crushing inevitability — Republic.com 2.0. In it, he critiqued the impact of the net on democratic discourse and public spaces. His dystopia is one where we all subscribe to the Daily Me, a filter that presents us only with the worldview of people we agree with. What we gain in (temporary) contentedness we lose in critical appraisal and debate — with potentially dire political and social consequences.

I think there are three sets of reasons why Sunstein's dystopia will not come about:

Filtering and recommender systems will always be imperfect; they'll never be as good as their evangelists would have you believe.
Even if perfect filtering did work, people wouldn't like it; they'd quickly get 'perfect' fatigue.
If people did liked perfect filtering, we wouldn't need the blogs that Sunstein argues are the medium of 'echo chamber' opinion: if all you ever have to say is 'me too' in chorus with your like-minded peers, the whole point of blogging (self-casting) disappears.

After my book was reviewed alongside Republic.com 2.0, James Harkin at the ICA invited me to give a response to Professor Sunstein when he was due to speak there last December. Unfortunately Sunstein had to cancel his trip to the UK, and, since he's published several more books since then, the chances of me delivering my response in person are low. So here it is in writing instead.

1

When will perfect personalisation arrive?. It's just round the corner, isn't it? Well, yes, but it always has been. Back in 01994, The Guardian produced a prototype of its personalised 02004 edition. With all the chaff for 'other people' taken out, it was only twelve small pages long. Compare that prototype of what the paper actually looked like in 02004, and you get a sense of how much trust to put in projections of a personalised future.

I'm not saying the scope and application of personalisation technologies and recommender systems won't extend. But I think Sunstein has allowed himself to be gulled by those who — out of either public-spiritedness (they think these technologies would make the world more efficient) or private interest (they're selling the technologies) — paint scenarios where personalisation is much more widespread and powerful than it is ever likely to be.

My prediction is that in 20 years time, we will look at personalisation technologies in much the same way that we see the promises made in 01988 for Artificial Intelligence and Expert Systems: as "we're still waiting" mitigated failures. (Recommender systems share some techniques with AI, and it's a safe bet that some AI developers of years gone by now badge their work as personalisation and recommendation.)

2

Do people want perfect filters that feed them only what they like and agree with?. When I do talks about the use of recommender systems to help people discover music they will like, I use this image of what I call the perfect iPod (an idea borrowed from Paul Lamere). It doesn't have a screen so obviously it doesn't do video, but it's perfect for music nevertheless. It doesn't need a screen, because it knows better than you do what you want to hear. It has a comprehensive catalogue of all your likes and dislikes. Building on the Nike + iPod technology, it's connected to sensors in your feet and elsewhere so that it knows whether you're driving, walking, sitting, at the gym and so on. And its single "Play me music I will like" button senses your mood based on the galvanic skin response when you press the button. Taking all these data sources into consideration, the perfect iPod computes the exact sequence of songs to fit your circumstances, with the right mix of familiar and new music.

This is the Holy Grail that personalised media is supposed to be aiming for, but when I express it like this, most people seem to realise that it is (a) faintly ludicrous and (b) not the kind of music experience they want. They want a more organic and social relationship with music. Sometimes they want to share the same musical experience, whether at a gig or via the radio, even though that comes at the cost of losing personalisation. They're interested in what their friends are listening to. And, yes, they may have a few 'gatekeepers' (critics, DJs, bloggers), who they feel are on the same wavelength as them, and to whom they look for tips and recommendations. But the value of these is not to confirm or echo existing tastes, so much as to help them move on and broaden their musical tastes.

I wouldn't pretend that process of discovering new music is identical to that of articulating social and political views. But I suspect some of the dynamics may be similar.

3

One fundamental dynamic is that what motivates blogging, and indeed almost all dialogue, is difference. Occasionally people repeat things that they know their audience already knows and believes, usually as part of some grooming, socialisation or bonding ritual. But mostly we say stuff to other people precisely because we feel we're not identical to them, and we want to engage with the differences between ourselves. So some blog posts do just repeat what someone else said and add a simple "I agree" endorsement. But they're not the interesting ones, and the blogosphere would quickly grind to a rather dull halt if it comprised only such 'dialogue'. What animates blogs are opinions expressed precisely because the blogger suspects that her readers do not share all her views — even if the difference she's articulating is some hair-splitting between the dogma of the Revolutionary Communist Party (Marxist Leninist) and the Communist Party of Revolutionary Marxists.

To use an electrical metaphor, current only flows when there is a difference in 'potential' between two points. Without that, no lights, no heat, no motor of discussion and debate. Cass Sunstein reflects this point himself when discussing the American Constitution: "If everyone agreed, what would people need to talk about?" So widespread adoption of perfect filtering would end up defeating itself: we would be so in tune with the news and opinion media that filtered through to us that there would be no need for those media to say anything any more. And that's why we'd abandon the filters to make life interesting again.

Wrap-up

While Sunstein is a law professor, my professional training is as a psychologist. While he comes from a country with a constitution informed by a clear-eyed vision of democracy, I come from one that has muddled through for much longer with a succession of patched-up, make-do solutions rather than a coherent constitution. The space between these perspectives creates the potential for debate, discussion and argument (and possibly talking past each other!).

The shared ground is that attending to the public space and its function in democracy is clearly important. The net and blogs are having an effect, and we can't expect this effect to be all positive without any negatives. Stay wary, stay critical. But my hunch is that we don't need to get too hung up about the Daily Me and perfect information filters.

Links for 2008-09-16 [del.icio.us]

Wed, 17 Sep 2008 00:00:00 PDT

Streaming versus Downloading: What are they good for?
Is it too simplistic to say streaming = discovery = flirting (= the new radio?) while downloading = ownership = commitment (= the new record collection?)

Links for 2008-07-29 [del.icio.us]

Wed, 30 Jul 2008 00:00:00 PDT

The social life of a playlist
My thoughts on online playlists in general and muxtape in particular -- in response to some questions from Austrian journalist, Patrick Dax

On Slow Blogging

Sun, 25 May 2008 16:59:00 -0700

About a month ago, or maybe two, I was on the sofa at London's Social Media Cafe having a chat to David Wilcox. We had no deals to do, and no pressing initiatives to scheme about, but our interests and contacts overlap at several points, and it was a wide-ranging discussion [Update, 30 November 02008: it turns out Lloyd Davis took a photo of this chat.]. I can't remember quite how it came up, but we started to talk about our approaches to blogging, and particularly the tacit pressure to provide more or less instant comment on developments in our respective fields.

Having recently written a book about how people discover music and other media online, I'm sure my publishers would love it if I were to raise my profile as a digital pundit, passing on the latest news and maybe adding my angle to it. For example, they asked me to provide a few words on the Radiohead In Rainbows story last October.

But, as I explained to David, that kind of thing doesn't come naturally to me. I don't think my first thoughts are necessarily my best thoughts, and often it's better to let the dust settle a bit before passing opinion. For example, it was probably a few weeks before it became clear that Radiohead had made a mistake by not providing a streaming version of their album for people to try it out. As a consequence, the only way for non-die-hard fans to judge how much it was worth to them was to download it — which they did for free, rather than paying, precisely because they didn't yet know if it was worth more than that. In hindsight, I could have made a more telling, and controversial suggestion, about the failure of In Rainbows as a discovery case study, just by waiting a bit.

Maybe, said David, we need a Slow Blogging movement. That was a bit of an Aha! moment for me… but I thought I wouldn't rush into writing about it, and sure enough more useful pointers have emerged since…

I knew that the Slow Blogging idea was too good to be completely original, and, indeed, a quick Google search revealed that many had played with the term before.

But it was another pointer from David — arriving, ironically, via Twitter a few days later — that I found most interesting: Joe Kissell's lengthy and thoughtful essay on how different people engage with so-called 'microblogging' services like Twitter (the ones that encourage you to provide updates many times throughout the day).

I've never taken the Myers-Briggs personality test referred to in Kissell's piece, but I know enough about it and related tests to be fairly certain that I am an 'introvert' in its terminology. That terminology isn't quite the same as common usage: being an 'introvert' doesn't automatically mean that I am shy and retiring, but it does mean that my natural instinct is to orient myself more to trains of thought and feeling as they unfold 'internally' than to the flow of 'external' events and messages that come at me. There are strengths and weaknesses to this trait (as there are for extroverts), but it backs up the tendency for me to be less likely to shoot from the hip in response to every new announcement, and more likely to chew over a number of developments, try and synthesise them, and then come out, eventually, with some original or considered reflections.

And then a few weeks later I came across another rather wonderful Slow Blogging site (via Russell Davies' blog) called dawdlr. It uses the tumblr microblogging service, but subverts it, and Twitter, by virtue of its pace. Like Twitter, dawdlr lets you post and share status updates on what you're doing, but you have to send them by postcard. And, after they've been scanned in (see the example dawdlr postcard above), they'll be put on the website, which is updated… every six months.

The simple implication from this is that you need to think about what you're doing 'now' on a different timeframe. That's to say, not so much heading to this evening's meet-up, as composting the relationships, ideas and opportunities that will fertilise next year's growth.

And when I say 'I'm blogging', on a longer timeframe what I mean is that I'm turning over and testing out possible ideas, hoping to sift which are useful to me and to others. Right now I have a list of 27 ideas for blog posts. Over time this list tends to get longer rather than shorter, though at least a third and possibly more than half of those posts will never get written because they'll be overtaken by events, or written by someone else. (Though in a short while, the list will briefly be down to 26.)

Am I kidding myself about this? Is there value in forgoing the rapid-fire, driven-my-news-agenda for something a little more contemplative, or does that fly in the face of what blogging demands? What examples of big successes from this approach are there?

Any answers, or wider ruminations, welcome — in your own time.

[Update, 30 November 02008: at the start of this month, I was contacted by a reporter from the New York Times, asking me what the term 'slow blogging' signified for me. She didn't use my hastily-written response, and you may agree she was not to do so: "For me 'slow blogging' means taking the time to let the pattern of events reveal itself, rather than responding to each happening by shooting from the hip. If you blog about your garden every day, you'll focus on changes over a short timeframe — usually the last few days — but you may miss getting a full perspective on the change of the seasons. And how will you convey climate change year after year in a way that holds your readers' attention. How will they see the wood for the trees?"]

Culture and Learning: response to consultation paper

Thu, 01 May 2008 03:46:24 -0700

A couple of months ago the UK think tank Demos published a consultation paper with the title Culture and Learning: Towards a New Agenda. The paper aims to challenge cultural professionals and educationalists "to provide a new and coherent direction for creative learning and for encouraging creativity through culture", and the consultation period runs until next Tuesday.

I find it a curious intervention, because in some ways it seems to be swimming against the tide. There is a strong emphasis on centralisation and standardisation, the favoured interventions of old-school bureaucrats.

Hat tip to Bridget McKenzie whose own response to this consultation brought it to my attention. And following her lead in making her response public, here is mine, organised according to the six issues that the paper encourages us to address.

1 How best to define cultural learning

The definition of cultural learning on page 11 suffers from comparison with the Museum, Libraries and Archives Council (MLA) definition on the previous page, and the difference between these definitions highlights issues that run through the rest of the Paper.

I understand (and support) the reasons why the Paper has restricted itself to the 'art' definition of culture rather than the 'ethnographic' definition. But even with this restriction, we cannot get away from the fact that cultural interpretations are a proxy for hammering out who and what we are.

The MLA definition captures this by using terms such as active engagement and making sense of the world. The definition on page 11 goes off the rails as soon as it speaks of acquiring behaviours, knowledge and values. The former represents learning as a fluid and dynamic process of exploration, interpretation, debating of contested meanings and identity formation. The latter represents it as paternalistic transmission of a set of approved and standardised meanings.

As a secondary point, the page 11 definition risks getting mixed up between cart and horse in cultural learning when it refers to enjoyment motivating and enhancing learning, as though culture was somehow the sugar coating on the (bitter?) pill of more serious lessons. Learning should enhance enjoyment as much as vice-versa. There seems to be a hidden agenda between the lines of the document that culture is a means to the end of making us all better citizens. (When culture and politics get into a tussle, politics may win the battle, but culture will win the war — it runs slower and deeper.)

Throughout the Paper I had a sense that what the author really wanted was a 21st century, vaguely interactive version of Kenneth Clark's Civilisation TV series from forty years ago, which could be 'implemented' nationally. Irrespective of how the landscape has changed since then, it's important to remember that the subtitle of that series was A Personal View, not A Standardised (or Canonical) View. Even the patrician strand of cultural education has acknowledged its roots in subjectivity and the possibility of alternative, incommensurate frameworks.

And the landscape has changed. We live in a world where we choose our cultural 'programme' to fit our interests and social relationships, rather than having its parameters set by Reithian overseers. I have written about the new behaviours of cultural discovery that are emerging as a result (in my recent book: see About Me at the end of this letter), which I describe as 'free-range foraging' whereby we group and swarm around common cultural interests. Yes, we still absorb what institutions and mass media put out to interest and entertain us, but we also re-interpret and re-present it to each other in blogs and on social networks. This is good old-fashioned meaning-making, made newly visible — on a grand scale — and durable by digital media.

It's a brave man or woman who goes up against these anarcho-democratic dynamics by seeking to conjure a national framework wherein citizens can reliably acquire the behaviours, knowledge and values that will "equip people for the world of today and tomorrow". I salute your courage in staking out a position that goes against the prevailing intellectual fashion for more 'emergent' and 'participative' approaches. But I have to ask (a) what's driving this return to centralisation and standardisation, with its open disdain for localism and specialisms? and (b) you and whose army? (Hence, I guess, your questions about leadership...)

2 How to embed cultural learning more firmly in the education and learning sectors and in cultural organisations

In its own discussion of possible solutions, the Paper references the National College for School Leadership's network learning communities. With my associate Seb Schmoller, I have recently done a consulting project for NCSL to recommend the design directions for the next iteration of the infrastructure that supports these communities. Without giving away any confidences, the approach aims to define a small 'centre', managed by the College with appropriate controls and standards, but a wider 'penumbra' where the participants have a great deal of autonomy to collaborate on terms that they decide, and using their favoured tools and approaches. The only discipline imposed is that participants are encouraged to make the outcomes from this work readily accessible to the centre, and may be rewarded for doing so.

The relevance of this model to embedding cultural learning in education and learning sectors and in cultural organisation is this: embedding doesn't have to mean whipping organisations into line to create a whole new strand of activity on top of what they've already been whipped into submission to do. If you create a minimalist framework - or just an enabling platform - for organisations to make visible and share widely their existing cultural learning, there is a good chance that more sustainable standards and voluntary frameworks will emerge. Create the conditions that make it easy and rewarding for organisations to collaborate, share and develop cultural learning practices, and they will do so.

Organisations in the cultural and education sectors could also adopt a similar approach, creating a permeable membrane between what they do as part of their core mission as an institution and the many activities that go on beyond their control, beyond their intervention and without their sanction, yet which have potential relevance to its aims. Significant numbers of students and audiences are motivated to learn about, and from, culture. Too often they do so on their own terms because they feel the terms of cultural and education organisations are too constraining.

Those organisations can thrive by positioning themselves as cultural exchanges where people communicate and share their interpretations. At the moment Bebo is probably doing this better than most libraries and public collections.

3 How to identify the most effective leaders to drive improvement in cultural learning

Put simply: create the conditions for these leaders to identify themselves.

Create a platform that helps cultural learning practitioners discover the projects, people and resources that might be relevant to their own aims, and that supports them making entrepreneurial connections. With the right channels and information infrastructure in place, leaders will soon make themselves known.

4 What the leadership role in cultural learning should comprise

I'm not sure that they're any different from leadership in other areas, but here are a few traits that spring to mind:

the ability to spot the seed of a good idea, or a good implementation of an idea, even when it's hidden in a lot of extraneous rubbish and noise;
the ability to enrol the people with promising ideas in an ambitious vision, to influence and engage in circumstances where you can't control;
the ability to work across boundaries, recognise the value of formal and informal interventions in cultural learning, and manage the ecosystem so that both kinds support and feed off each other.

5 How to develop a set of shared standards, and a definition of excellence relating to cultural learning

Page 23 of the Paper suggests adapting the MLA's Inspiring Learning for All framework for wider use. This seems to me one sound foundation on which to build: the framework has the benefit of several years of experience, and is sufficiently generic to be adaptable to specific contexts without being so generic as to be lacking in substance.

Having said that, with regard to the process for developing shared standards, I would recommend starting at the point of aggregating existing practice in the cycle of standards development:

If you start with analysis or specification, you risk missing potentially important practices in cultural learning.

I confess I have little time for the idea of 'defining excellence', possibly as a result of the experience of ever-sprouting Centres of Excellence that serve mainly to accelerate the cycle of fads and generally seem to peddle mediocrity with a short shelf-life. At the same time, I concede this not an argument against assessment or judgements of quality. The range of things we can measure is growing significantly, particularly in the digital world, but it's not clear which of these metrics are going to be the most valuable.

I'd recommend that the first stage should be to benchmark several cultural learning initiatives on several different measures at each stage in their lifecycle (recognising that individual initiatives go through a lifecycle of conception, growth and death, even as the collective 'river' of learning continues to flow).

6 How to improve the profile, scale and effectiveness of cultural learning

I hope my answers above have gone some way to addressing this point.

To address the effectiveness point, we need to agree what cultural learning is for. The Paper doesn't discuss this at length, and refers just to "how to equip people for the world of today and tomorrow".

There is no doubt that cultural learning can play a role in building social bridges and deepening trust and cohesion. Much of what goes on in social networks (broadly defined, online and offline) is driven by a desire to connect with culture through people and to connect with people through culture. The culture we choose to explore makes us who we are.

I worry that the Paper may underestimate the amount of self-motivated and informal cultural learning that takes place off the radar of governments, schools and cultural institutions. Activity that takes place without institutional sanction or support inevitably ends up having low status within institutions. Frequently they dismiss its non-institutional nature as 'fragmented', missing the point that its diversity, flexibility and high degree of personalisation are precisely its strength. It will be a big challenge to change this. And I am wary that the solution to this should not be to institutionalise spontaneous behaviour, but to capture its essence, accelerate its momentum, and make links to related activities.

7 About me

I am independent consultant, working through my company DJ Alchemi Ltd. I help organisations tackle any issues they may have with online learning and discovery. Recent clients include NESTA, the Association for Learning Technology, unionlearn and the National College for School Leadership. I am the author of Net, Blogs and Rock'n'Roll: How Digital Discovery Works and What it Means for Consumers, Creators and Culture (published 2007). For more details, please see http://alchemi.co.uk/about/ or http://alchemi.typepad.com/about.html .

I hope this response is useful, and wish you well with your final report.

Yours sincerely

David Jennings

Against Method in Innovation

Fri, 28 Mar 2008 07:57:17 -0700

I've signed up for NESTA's Innovation Edge conference in a few weeks. Though I'm looking forward to what promises to be a stimulating day, I'm kind of surprised that the abstract concept of innovation remains so popular with policy makers and agencies.

Using innovation as a catch-all term to cover a wide range of changes in products, services and organising creates the expectation that these changes share important characteristics and, critically, may share similar solutions. But do they, should they, or could they? To take the relatively narrow domain of integrated IT, on the one hand you have the Apple approach; on the other open source. How much do they have in common? Not an awful lot.

Perhaps my wariness and scepticism comes from being exposed, at an impressionable age, to Paul Feyerabend's "anything goes" approach to scientific method. Feyerabend didn't deny the value of method; he was arguing against hidebound adherence to any particular set of rules and methods. He argued for a more laissez-faire approach to combining multiple approaches, and being prepared to bend the rules when circumstances encouraged it.

If you want to wind people up, you refer to this way of thinking as epistemological anarchism. If you want to calm and reassure, you're better off talking of methodological pluralism. I'm hoping to hear both at Innovation Edge, which takes place in London on 20 May this year, and is free to attend (but places are limited and require registration).

The Age of the Free MP3 Player

Tue, 08 Jan 2008 03:35:50 -0800

This is the season where many bloggers are providing their predictions for the year ahead. I tend to opt out of these because a year is both too long and too short to foresee many types of change, which are like rainstorms or earthquakes: you know one's coming, but you don't know quite when or where until the early warning signs appear. I'm more of a Long Bets man, so today I'm going to revisit something I've touched on occasionally in the past, most recently nearly two years ago: the falling price of MP3 players and the possible implications for listening/buying experiences.

In the last year or so there's been a growing wave of music being distributed on USB sticks — the picture is of Radiohead's 6-album "boxed set" in its USB version, which, at $160 or £79.99, somehow cost twice as much as the CD version of the same albums. The problem with these products is that, once you've copied the data off the stick, the stick is just… a stick. You can keep it on a shelf, back-up your homework or your novel on it, forget about it in the glove compartment or loan it to a friend who forgets it in his glove compartment. It's a piece of plastic with some data on it.

But add a player to it, and it has a different kind of value. Now you just have to bring your own headphones (or powered speakers) and you've got all you need to keep you entertained for as long as six Radiohead albums turn you on (about 15 minutes in my case, but these people may differ).

In February 02006 I was quoting £39.99 for an MP3 player, but now iPromo are offering 1GB MP3 players for £10 if you buy in bulk. Tzomé are offering MP3 players with your band's music preloaded for the same price. How long before branded versions of these, packed with maybe the latest album plus a recording of tonight's performance, appear at the merchandise table at gigs? They could cost less than the hooded sweatshirts and still be profitable.

Buy the music and the player comes with it. I think this could be part of a wider building of momentum for tools that exploit the increasingly marginal costs of basic, high-volume technology components. (The OLPC laptop could be seen as another example.)

Quite when this will grow into a full-blown 'wave' of products that reach beyond niche markets is hard to predict. Within another 2-3 years? Ultimately, of course, the wave may break when we get photos of landfill sites clogged with disposable gadgets that have been disposed of. Then we'll all have one government-registered device, ergonomically made to measure each of us individually, but with a usage life measured in decades, which we have to upgrade and maintain. Just joking — though my turntable is 27 years old and sounding just as good as it ever did (cost of ownership around £5 per year); I hope one day to own something equally as long-lived.

Looking for examples of social networking for professional development

Thu, 03 Jan 2008 15:18:33 -0800

I'm copying here something I've just added to the OpenRSA blog, relating to some work I'm doing in collaboration with Seb Schmoller:

I'm looking for examples of organisations (or looser affiliations of individuals) who are using social software for professional development. Does anyone have any suggestions that I could follow up?

By social software I mean social networks (e.g. Facebook, Ning), blogs, wikis, shared bookmarks etc. And professional development can mean many things, but I'm mostly interesting in enhancing intrinsic job-specific skills on the one hand and broader scouting of collaborative/entrepreneurial opportunities on the other. The organisations could be membership-based, employers, educators or just self-organising networks.

The selfish part of this is that it relates to some work I'm doing for the National College for School Leadership, who are interested in extending the way they use social software with their constituency of school leaders. I'm happy to feed back the lessons from any leads that anyone gives me and share them with readers of this blog. Look forward to hearing from you if you can recommend any suitable examples (with contact details if possible). Our immediate deadline is 18th January, but happy to continue the discussion beyond then…

Any suggestions welcome, either via comments here, or private communication.

Does the nature of social networks limit their growth?

Wed, 02 Jan 2008 04:30:21 -0800

One idea in John Naughton's 02007 round-up/02008 predictions struck me: that social networks like MySpace and Facebook "are likely to peak because ego-centric social networking is intrinsically limiting: after you've 'befriended' everyone you know, what else is there to do?". He continues,

Next year will see mass outbreaks of a Facebook fatigue, as busy professionals realise they are wasting an hour or more a day on essentially mindless activities. By contrast, activity-based networking sites, such as Flickr.com, will continue to prosper, for the simple reason that they are not self-limiting in the way that ego-centric services are.

On Flickr, as long as you maintain your interest in photography, you will always have more photos you can upload share. On Last.fm, there will always be more music to discover and listen to.

But Naughton's suggestion that there's nothing to do on Facebook and MySpace ignores the role on social networks of people who make it their business to aggregate people, broker new collaborations or create messages that people will want to share. A minority of these are precious: latch onto their coattails and you will get good introductions to fascinating people. The majority are poisonous: once they have your details they will besiege you with all kinds of message and pokes that are either tiresomely self-promotional or bemusingly random.

The sad fact is that it's the bores that drive the most visible and aggressive growth in activity, so the likes of MySpace and Facebook tend to encourage them. But fast growth leads to fast fatigue. We might all be better off if the social networks would nurture the gold dust few who do networking really well.

Animating the future of population and cities

Mon, 10 Dec 2007 03:41:25 -0800

One of those happy synchronicities has alerted me to two different ways of presenting information information about population growth. And, to compound the coincidence, the same topic was raised in a discussion with David Puttnam that I attended in the same week as I discovered them.

First is this video, which was featured in the Long Now Foundation blog. The animation of population growth from year 00000 to 02020 (Common Era) runs from 0:45 through to 3:35. The quickening pulse rate is a bit hammy, especially as the visuals alone tell a pretty compelling story (hint: wait until the last few seconds).

A more recent treatment of the same situation, but projecting from 02000 to 02100, and focusing particularly on our biggest cities comes from the site 19.20.21. The basic premise and story here is that there will be 19 cities in the world with 20 million (or more) people in the 21st century.

In 01800 just 3% of the world's population lived in cities. Now the proportion is over half, and expected to exceed two thirds by 02050. The difficulty is that in some respects this is clearly unprecedented in history, but in others we've been here before: almost exactly a year ago I quoted Steven Johnson on London in 01854, when the city's population was 2.5 million, "No city had ever been this big, and many believed that it was too big; that it was unsustainable at its current size and and before long it would have to shrink to one tenth as many people"

19.20.21 takes you through the different dimensions of this metropolitan growth: the relation to water and climate change (most of the 19 cities are next to the ocean), communications networks, the politics of nation states as the mega-cities become quasi states in their own right, and the distribution of wealth.

The site is effectively a trailer for a series of publications and events, inviting corporate subscribers. I wondered who was behind this site and whether they had any corporate or ideological axe to grind. Not yet, appears to be the answer. It traces back to Richard Saul Wurman, from Rhode Island, who has a long and distinguished background in information design.

More on building networks

Fri, 23 Nov 2007 07:04:13 -0800

Photo copyright and cc-licensed
by Lloyd Davis.

It was about 15 years ago, as I was planning my escape from my job in the civil service, that I became interested in the activity of networking — both personal networking (as a way of finding new work opportunities) and the creation of networks that make links between (rather than within) organisations. Over those 15 years, there's no way I could count the number of networking initiatives (online and offline) that I've taken part in. Over a hundred, for sure. In some cases you can tell right off that the venture will last only a few months and then wither away; in others it's much harder to predict. Often it doesn't matter: longevity isn't everything, and I enjoy the simple spirit of experimentation — "let's try this out and see if it we can make it work this way" — that imbues many of the most unusual networks.

Are the best networks built from scratch on greenfield land or is it better to work within an existing organisation and layer networking on top of some shared history? I'll spare you the suspense of building towards a conclusion by saying that I think both are valid, there are pros and cons of either approach, and "it depends" on the specific context. Having got that out of the way, here are a couple of contrasting examples from recent experience.

1

The RSA has been around for 253 years. I joined about thirteen years ago after attending a "Tomorrow's Company" event there about the re-invention of enterprises. What appealed to me was that the place reeked of The Establishment, with a good quota of greying old men in suits from National Institutions, but that they and others were saying challenging things about radical changes needed in corporate governance and society at large. I've written quite a lot about RSA events here (e.g. see my notes on the Adelphi Charter), and upgraded to life membership ("fellowship") a few years ago, so I'm committed long term.

On the other hand, while I've always been supportive of what the RSA does, I've always felt on the periphery. Apparently I'm not alone in this. In the last year or so, the organisation has made several steps to encourage greater involvement from the 27,000 fellows, and also to reach out into the broader community: "civic innovation" as the new CEO calls it. The range of activity from both within the organisation and from those fellows who are already engaged means that there's an official blog, an unofficial one, a wiki, a Facebook group and a Google group. Which makes it quite hard to keep up and be confident that you're not missing anything. Especially — and this is one of the downsides of working within an old, Establishment organisation — for the reasonable proportion of fellows who, being of advanced years, don't spend much, if any, time online.

All of this activity has been building a head of steam up to an event yesterday where 250 invited fellows discussed the way forward. (I wasn't one of them, though I've taken part in a couple of preliminary events and even contributed to the flurry of activity with a blog post.) Apparently this will involve a combination of top-down and bottom-up changes.

2

When you're starting from scratch, meanwhile, there isn't a top and bottom. At least, there is in the sense that some people are in the driving seat and others are sitting more on the sidelines to see how things develop — but because this is based on commitment, not history, there is more up for grabs and roles are more fluid.

A couple of days ago I attended the first 'prototyping' meeting of the London Social Media Café;. The initiative for this came from Lloyd Davis, and I happened across it when my Facebook feed told me that a couple of my friends had joined a group that sounded interesting. Now I am potentially one of the first movers in this new network of independent creative and technology professionals.

In the subgroup in which I participated we discussed how this venture should be constituted as an organisation. How should members retain ownership as it grows? What kind of "executive group" should there be? Should the Social Media Café be not-for-profit, and, if so, could it raise enough money through grants, sponsorship or membership contributions. Most important, I think, in the early days of a new social venture is finding sufficient people who are prepared to contribute their time and energy in the knowledge that the tangible rewards for this will be modest, if there are any at all.

The Social Media Café doesn't have the backdrop of the RSA's 253 years of history, so volunteers don't even have the confidence that it will still exist a few years from now. The risk is greater, the control is greater, and the baggage is much less.

Networking, like other kinds of investing, is about spreading your risks. So, for the time being, I'm going to try and keep some kind of involvement in both the RSA's established institution and the Social Media Café's start-up initiative.