As many readers know there has been a internet blackout on a number of very large websites like wikipedia and WordPress.com and .org on 18th of Jan.

As Clay Shirky sees it – SOPA & PIPA are designed to “raise the cost of copyright compliance” for amateurs by changing the burden of proof so that pretty much all content not owned by “Big Media” is blocked.

The method – use the domain name system to block access – even though technically this is unlikely to work at all. Unfortunately there are other issues better explained elsewhere where the sides-effects and consequences will cause much confusion and collateral damage.

We are used to producing as well as consuming and digital technology allows us to do this when we share content that we originate, that we find and sometime what we change on the way through. (Creative commons licensing is an intelligent attempt to manage content rights.)

My summary – whatever the merits of copyright protection (and clearly that system is very broken) SOPA is not the way to fix it.

Also once a piece of legislation like this is passed it becomes much easier to foist it on smaller countries like NZ especially with the present government (via ACTA).  Remember the debate over the Copyright (Infringing File Sharing) Amendment Act 2011. Sadly many of the politicians in NZ had no real clues at the time but these issues need much smarter thinking as they are part of a much wider agenda.

John C. Dvorak on SOPA: Don’t Get Suckered by What Comes Next
John says SOPA is a sideshow for another bill

“This is so that the real bill, Senate S.968. The Patrick Leahy “Protect IP Act of 2011? will pass — while all the nuts argue about and then celebrate victory over SOPA.

The House will quickly agree and rubber-stamp the Senate bill which, according to those fighting these bills, is about 96 percent as terrible.

This is a disaster waiting to happen.

Nobody is focusing attention on this parallel bill. Watch this scam get executed like clockwork.”

One of the most fascinating chapters in Daniel Levitin’s book “This is Your Brain on Music” is about how musical tastes are often set early in life and become quite hard to change later on.

It has been a while since I read the book but Levitin goes into much more detail on why we like what we like. The question I was looking to answer though was “Is there a Way to flip people back into music Explorer mode?

It turns out that short answer is “no- not really”. The music that we like is very much connected to our own culture and identity and often from a particular time like our teenage years. I’m over simplifying here but we develop our own schemas which are like a musical map or filter that becomes part of our music processing brain.

Levitin also has this idea that we might be able to tune our music systems like tuning to a new radio station. In real life though many people go with what they are comfortable with and this extends to our expectations about new music from our favourite bands.

I’d say that Elvis Costello fans will be on the high adventure end of the scale since Elvis is clearly an explorer and new styles, sounds, ideas and reinvention is part of his brief.

OTH many bands almost get trapped into a particular “sound signature” where new songs often reference their earlier work. The art is to make new music but take your listeners with you on that journey.

I was struck by this when local faves ELEMNO P released a new song “Slow Down” which sounds very much like an old song (not a bad thing at all), much more like their 1st and second albums than their 3rd album. Listen for yourself as you can download it for a tweet from http://weareelemenop.tumblr.com/ But I digress

In the same chapter about musical likes Daniel muses about the possibility of an

“adventuresomeness knob …that will control the mix of old and new etc.”

In this time of sharing and socialising our likes and activities it is no surprise that Spotify is launching in NZ soonish. Spotify socialises the sharing of musical playlists with your friends. It is very closely tied to facebook as there are some common shareholders.

For more background read – Spotify’s Daniel Ek: The Most Important Man In Music – Forbes

For a alternative service check out LetsListen and their site is http://letslisten.com/

However I tend to think that most people know someone in their extended group who is a tastemaker of sorts and for those who like to explore new music there are many that are very well established now.

The Hype Machine is one of the better ones and as the PBS video below shows there are many other great “tastemaker” sites out there. Maybe this is the real “adventuresome” music button?

Off Book: The Evolution of Music Online from PBS Arts on Vimeo.

As in many countries, New Zealand has had several prime city locations occupied in recent weeks as part of the Occupy Wall St OWS movement.

OWS is an ongoing movement which aims to reset the economic agendas and local debates about equality of citizens and to try and re-balance some of the competing corporate and government agendas towards more balanced outcomes.

As in many protest movements there are other opportunists who seek to tilt the activities in a certain way but on the whole OWS is a consciousness raising exercise that everyone (especially corporates and government) would do well to take note of.

Like many I have been intrigued as to what this is all about in the local context and what (if any) connections there are to the Arab Spring protests and other consciousness raising movements around the world.

In my view there are definite connections between these movements and the rise of the NGO sector globally. Since the anti-globalisation protests in 1999 at the Seattle WTO conference there has been growing disquiet at the very far reaching implications of economic and political change around the world being driven by small elites at the expence of local and humanitarian interests.

The Canadian documentary The Corporation from 2003 captures some of the debate from many perspectives. Apparently there were 33 hours of video made and so the main documentary is a relative snapshot of expert views.

I was most impressed by CEO  Ray Anderson (from the Interface carpet & fabric company) who had his own wake up call towards developing his company along more sustainable lines. Ray mentioned an author called Paul Hawken and an earlier book by Paul called The Ecology of Commerce. Even more interesting to me is a more recent book by Hawken called

“Blessed Unrest, How the Largest Movement in the World Came into Being and Why No One Saw It Coming published by Viking Press (New York) in May 2007, argues that a vast world-changing “movement with no name” is now forming, which Hawken believes will prevail. He conceives of this “movement” as developing not by ideology but rather through the identification of what is and is not humane, like an immune system. ”

I haven’t been able to get a copy of the book to read yet but the hypothesis sounds very plausible and it does fit in what we see around us in the politics and economic debates of many nations.

Last year I saw the documentary Inside Job which among many arguments makes the depressing point that President Obama has not fixed any of the broken financial systems and structures in the U.S. In fact he has re-appointed the very people responsible for causing many of the financial meltdowns back into new roles where they can continue abusing the trust of voters despite having blood on their hands.

And so we know for sure now that US politics is completely corrupt and broken to the point that a reforming president elect has been so completely dominated by the commercial interests he said he wanted to fix.

The other key point in the that documentary was an observation that many of the high profile economists and academics had their viewpoints deeply compromised by their own commercial conflicts. That is – they were part of the problem where financial sector lobbyists have / had around 5 lobbyists for every single congress person. Never mind the lobbyists for other sectors.

How and Where does this Affect Us?

New Zealand like many other countries is being pressured by huge corporate interests mostly from the US to accept commercially driven laws designed to protect globalisation and to undermine local sovereignty.

One example of this is that the debate over Pharmac and US TPP negotiations or should that be stand-over tactics.

Back in May this year the PM said of TPP and Pharmac

“Let’s wait and see – there are a lot of component parts here. We’re talking about access, through a free trade agreement, to arguably the largest economy in the world. That’s the prize if you can complete a US FTA, which is what TPP is,” he said.

More obviously though when the US sneezes we still tend to catch the cold. The US despite its downward spiral still dominates world trade thinking and any changes to such rules impacts greatly on smaller nations like New Zealand.

I’m with Kennedy Graham of the Greens on this issue.

“Graham said the Greens rejected the assertion a free trade deal was a massive prize for New Zealand, saying the massive prize would be the predation of New Zealand’s iconic agencies by American corporations.

If the US walked away from the negotiations because Pharmac was taken off the table “so be it”, he said.”

While looking for the Paul Hawken book  mentioned above I found and bought a copy of The Price of Civilization, Economics and Ethics after the Fall by Jeffrey Sachs. That is my holdiday reading. More on that next post when I finish it for now here is a video clip from him.

As Jeffrey says “The US is in a structural crisis”…

Since the global financial crisis (GFC) started in 2008 (or was it ’07) it has become more obvious that business as usual is one of the first casualties.

Some of us have been working on more sustainable business ideas as it has been clear for a long time that the “growth at all costs” mantra has run out of room. Looking back over this blog it has become a recurring topic as various economic, social and cultural indicators have started to redline.

However it takes a long time to change the culture around many of these driving ideas and so the GFC in many respects is now acting as a kind of circuit breaker to make businesses and consumers rethink out attitudes to all kinds of resources and business activities.

It is pleasing to see more sustainability projects gaining momentum. In the words of the Sustainable Future Institute project 2058

“The world is changing and, as New Zealanders, we need to think about what this means for us and our future.

Often strategic thinking only occurs in terms of the three-year election cycle, but this does not prepare us well for the opportunities and challenges that lie ahead.

Promoting long-term thinking, leadership and capacity-building to manage an uncertain future is critical.

To help address these challenges and opportunities the Sustainable Future Institute is developing a vision of what a sustainable New Zealand may look like in the year 2058 and an overarching strategy to reach this vision – this is known as Project 2058.”

The italics and bolding above are mine but I certainly agree that we need to take a longer term view on all kinds of projects. In my neighbourhood I’d like to give a great big hat tip to GreyLynn 2030 which is part of the transition towns movement.

Some of you know that from August this year I have been lecturing part time on digital marketing at Unitec. It has been a great pleasure to be part of a 50 person cohort of students from NZ and many from overseas who are looking at business futures with fresh eyes.

In reading essays and assignments on future business from the students it has become apparent that many of us are unclear on where NZ makes its money and where our economic future lies.

We also just had an election campaign that was knee deep in platitudes and backslapping from a presidential style beauty contest. No surprise to see that the best looking pony won but the prime Minister is in lala land is he thinks an increase of 2-3% of votes is really a mandate for asset stripping and idealogy driven changes to education.

The Greens have won 14 seats and in some electorates got more than 20% of the vote. The National Party will ignore that at their peril. The rise of the Green party and what it represents is far more significant that any other demographic changes in the last election.

From the official results it is also clear that voter disillusionment with the parliamentary process is at an all time high for something like 1m voters not bothering to vote at all.

• The number of seats in Parliament will be 121.
• The National Party has lost one list seat compared to election night, and now has 59 seats in total.
• The Green Party has gained one list seat compared to election night, and now has 14 seats in total.

What we need now is for citizens to really examine some of the myths around the NZ economic and business future from a factual basis.

New Zealand is in a global economy and we need to rethink where our investments of time and resources go in the future. We need to build a more sustaining business culture that recognises that the same old, same old isn’t going to work.

The presentation by Sir Paul Callaghan offers some ideas for a way forward -(see video above) or link here if that embed doesn’t work  We need more innovation and smarter use of technology in business. We also need to stop perpetuating some of the old myths about NZ business and stop throwing good $ after bad.

It is time to look part the political posturing of yesterdays men ( politicians that is you) who are still thinking short term for the most part. Last week I was delighted to have a look around Fisher & Paykel Healthcare which is a $500m company that New Zealand needs more of.

It is time to reframe the debate and understand where NZ has real competitive advantage come from. Lets go there instead of leaving it to commodities markets and bankers who really are still stuck in a zero sum game. Time to remap and reinvent the future.

Here is what all the 10 year olds will be doing next. Thomas makes some other good points during his presentation – like most of the kids know way more about the technology than their teachers which is a real challenge for educators.

‘Thomas Suarez is a 6th grade student at a middle school in the South Bay of Los Angeles. When Apple released the Software Development Kit (SDK), he began to create and sell his own applications. “My parents, my friends and even the people at the Apple store all supported me,” he says, “and Steve Jobs inspired me”.

Thomas points out that it’s hard to learn how to make an app.

“For soccer you could go to a soccer team … but what if you want to make an app?” He’s started a club for fellow students at school, where he shares his knowledge of programming. Thomas articulates his vision that students are a valuable new technology resource to teachers, and should be empowered to offer assistance in developing the technology curriculum and also assist in delivering the lessons.

Thomas has been fascinated by computers and technology since before kindergarten. Recently, he’s been focused on the development of applications for the iPhone, and has established his own company, CarrotCorp’

Click here to view the embedded video.

from TEDxManhattanBeach

For more examples see SMH last week

The other example I liked was - iSpoke Flash Cards

‘Another student from NSW, Conner Brendish, 18, helped create the $4.49 iSpoke Flash Cards, an interactive flash cards app which gives users the ability to create their own flash cards, store them in albums and record or overdub their own voice.

It was designed as an educational tool for children with special needs. Anthony Toben, a parent frustrated with the technology available to assist and treat autism for his son Joshua, got Brendish to make it. From the proceeds, 50 cents of each sale is donated to Autism Spectrum Australia.’

Here is a glimpse into the future of online shopping from Korea. What is exciting and significant here is that customers using mobile phones are able to use QR codes to short cut straight to a shopping cart by scanning those codes directly off a poster.

We have seen some use of QR codes and mostly it has been trivial to date.

“A QR code (abbreviated from Quick Response code) is a type of matrix barcode (or two-dimensional code) designed to be read by smartphones. The code consists of black modules arranged in a square pattern on a white background. The information encoded may be text, a URL, or other data.”

For QR codes to be useful shoppers need to have access to a QR reader cable ecommerce shopping system, a smart phone and fast, inexpensive mobile data.

The display posters are close to lifesize photos of each of the products. I can see this is an exceptional idea for extending online shopping functionality to busy locations where a billboard space might be available.

In effect shoppers are able to browse the equivalent of a several metres wide screen image of key products without going near a computer. Although to be fair their smart phones do need to be able to read the qr codes off the posters.

We need to do some more research on exactly how to do this for online shopping sites but I suspect billboard owners will be extremely excited about this

My QR code is displayed at left and if you have a reader you can scan my contact details but just imagine I could also sell you an ecommerce report at the same time.

Now we’re talking business !

P.S We’ve been watching all of the coupon sites and while that seems like a good way to drive offline media traffic on to online channels not all deals work that well for vendors or the media channels.

Also the price of accessing the old media (TV for the most part) is still expensive and the unintended consequences of a huge rush of traffic to a website or physical store is not easy to manage or profit from. Getting repeat business is not easy to do if most of the shoppers are deal takers who just chase discounts.

“We’ve also heard consistently from certain categories of businesses (very popular ones I’m afraid) that daily deals are uneconomic for them, which does raise questions around the sustainability of “50% off” daily deals for these types of businesses.”

Yelp CEO says they are working on new developments to the daily deal type of business.

My money is on QR codes and this store concept from Korea is the future of online stores and no unsustainable 50% off foolish deals are needed to get more online business by heading down the QR path.

In 2011 we are all born global and to do well in the competition for capital and other resources we need to develop better measurement frameworks for promoting New Zealand as a centre for innovation to the rest of the world.

Its election year in New Zealand and one old chestnut that gets wheeled out is the idea that

“NZ has some of the lowest R&D spend in the OECD” 

on twitter by @paulbrislen *

Igor Portugal posted a response on his blog Liberty by IP   – “One solution: How to increase New Zealand’s R&D spending and stop educated people from leaving the country”

Igor says

“My response to Paul is that I don’t believe that the statistics are accurate. New Zealand companies don’t have an incentive to account for R&D. In fact there is a big disincentive to account for it. If you hired someone or purchased something and your intention is R&D, that means that it is a capital expense.”

We have seen the ebb and flow of some of these tax policies before.

Changing taxation policies might make more R & D spend visible but in my view it is not really something that will stop educated people leaving the country – or help improve NZ’s visibility on the innovation stage.

I’d agree with Igor in that I think much of NZ’s true R & D is not measured very well at all. And kudos for him in making these 2 suggestions:

“Step 1. Make all R&D related expenses 100% tax deductible, same as operating expenses.

This step will remove the accounting disincentive. However, in itself it is not enough.

Step 2. Reduce the income tax burden for all employees that are engaged in Research & Development activities. Make it so the higher the qualification, the lower the tax burden.”

Both of these ideas are worth debating especially in an election year.

There are some related topic questions here as well. The one I’m most interested in is how to sell NZ as an innovation centre on the world stage and while R & D investment would help with that – I do think there are other measurements that might be useful.

1. Number of Patents Issued

Back in the about 1993 I recall Simon Upton (he was Minister of Research, Science and Technology) using number of patents as a global indicator. As I remember it NZ ranked very highly after Switzerland at the time as a place with a proportionately high number of patents.

At the time I debated this idea with friends and colleagues and we agreed that patents; while useful didn’t always lead to useful outputs in the commercial sense.

Furthermore in a world of open source and pretty much instant global idea traffic I know a fair number of projects that just can’t be bothered with the patent process and many NZ businesses who wish that they hadn’t done. Defending IP is an expensive business.

If you measured how much legal budget was spent on defending IP around the world the U.S would win but again as an indicator that wouldn’t tell us very much.

However if you don’t defend your IP any innovation capital that you have can be seriously devalued by competitors and other commercial concerns.

Have a look over at Innovation in NZ stats each month which lists the number of designs, patents and trademarks registered.

2. Measuring Inputs generally

Even if we can really measure inputs like R & D spend and Patents etc. – once again these don’t always lead on to commercial success so that won’t work either.  A highly visible input would be population and given that 20% of the NZ population lives in Australia and else where in the world as part of the brain drain or whatever you want to call that.

Inputs are important but what really matters are the actual business outputs. Managers compete for resources globally now and while that does lead to some odd results like having 1m Nzers’ out of NZ they are not completely lost to NZ as a resource. Even though on the face of it NZ should have a local populations of 5m+.

Ironically Simon Upton has been one of NZ’s more interesting exports and has been offshore since 2001 and currently works for the OECD in Paris -  environment division of the OECD. Someone please get Simon back here a vist please.

I’ve had the personal pleasure to meet up and work with NZ’ers around the world and just because they are out of the country doesn’t mean that we are forgotten. I would guess having an NZ perspective at the OECD from someone like Simon would be invaluable.

3. International Start-up Competitions

I was at a Start-up competition in SF last year where I saw a top 10 of ideas that were presented.  In NZ terms some of them didn’t rate very well at all but a key competitive factor I liked was that all of them could scale to a billion plus.

In NZ we don’t think about global scale enough and if we did – we could enter some of those competitions and clean up. Demo is one event that I know a number of NZ and Australian companies have benefited from.

Perhaps we need to leverage one of the Demo Global events and make that type of competition much more visible down under…

4. Global Innovation Index and GEM

Each year there are various ranking tables touted as the definitive standard on such measurements.I’m pleased to see that the Global Innovation Index uses both inputs and outputs to get to a ranking.

New Zealand rated 15th on the Global Innovation Index 2011. We are down from #9 in 2010 and well up from 27th postion in 2009.

“The Global Innovation Index is computed as an average of the scores across inputs pillars (describing the enabling environment for innovation) and output pillars (measuring actual achievements in innovation).

Five pillars constitute the Innovation Input Sub-Index: ‘Institutions,’ ‘Human capital and research,’ ‘Infrastructure’, ‘Market sophistication’ and ‘Business sophistication’. The Innovation Output Sub-Index is composed of two pillars: ‘Scientific outputs’ and ‘Creative outputs’. The Innovation Efficiency Index, calculated as the ratio of the two Sub-Indices, examines how economies leverage their enabling environments to stimulate innovation results.”

Given that the study is sponsored in part by INSEAD my recommendation is that NZ policy makers and voters get a copy of the Global Innovation Index .

“It cannot be claimed, however, that the GII model captures all dimensions of innovation across continents. Analytical chapters included in this year’s Report illustrate the richness of innovation, which is difficult to define, much less to encapsulate in a particular metric.”

I had a look at the country index for NZ which you can download as a pdf. We actually rank at # 2 in the world for Institutions – which includes assessments of our Political environment, Regulatory environment and Business environment. Get a copy of the Global Innovation Index Exec Summary here.

On some of the other indicators like Business sophistication we don’t rank so highly.

GEM is a regular entrepreneur research study which has  three main objectives:

• To measure differences in the level of early stage entrepreneurial activity between countries
• To uncover factors determining the levels of entrepreneurial activity
• To identify policies that may enhance the level of entrepreneurial activity

5. A Contrary View

New Zealand is a backwater with stupid hayseed tech workers who don’t know what they are worth and should be exploited by Silicon Valley and others. OK – I’m paraphrasing a bit here but what to make of this bizarre post from the SAI last Thursday. In my view – exactly how not to promote NZ.

How To Pay Your People Half As Much And Give Them No Equity  – Nicholas Carlson

In the guise of boosting NZ as a place to innovate here Carlson quotes Paul Cameron.

“He mentioned his family and a general allegiance to his native land, but his business reasons were:

• Tech labor is cheap here. Cameron says he can pay a good Kiwi iOS developer half as much as he would have to pay someone in California or New York. What’s more: Cameron says Kiwi start-up employees don’t demand – or even really know to expect equity. That means if/when Cameron’s company reaches a liquidity event, all the money will come back to him and his investors. Cha-ching!

• The government is giving away money to startups. Eager to jump-start a tech industry, the New Zealand government, funded by huge tax receipts from a huge, but commoditized agriculture industry, is pouring money into startups in the form of non-equity grants and limited partner investments in VCs firms.  You don’t have to be Kiwi to get this money, by the way. You just have to incorporate here, keep your profits here, and own your patents and intellectual property here.”

I can only think that he seriously misheard the conversation or that Paul Cameron has a very low opinion of his staff and that can’t be good for anyone. If he contacts you looking for staff it will certainly make for an interesting conversation starter…

The comments about equity are very cynical if they are true. I can think of a number of high profile NZ tech companies where staff have equity but because of the actual shareholding structure are unlikley to ever be able to cash out.  A liquidity event if it ever happens is more likely if the company has a global profile and can cash out via a trade sale in a much larger market.

I’d say it’s actually the opposite. NZ staff expect to be paid better now because the actual likelihood of a liquidity event being useful to them is just much more remote. That means you can’t trade off pay in the short term in lieu of equity. The cost of living is cheaper here.

And the idea that the gov is giving away $ to start-ups. Good luck with that one. I can only conclude that Nick is doing some link baiting here. Your views please.

* Paul updated to say He’d like to see more R&D in NZ

Last week was the annual TED conference 2011 in Monterey. Would have loved to be there but lucky for us David Cowan was and he wrote up his TED Talks 2011 guide over here - David said

“The 2011 speaker lineup lived up to prior years. You can never tell beforehand which ones will be the classics; this year the standouts turned out to be General Stanley McChrystal, dinosaur hunter Jack Horner, transplant surgeon Anthony Atala, Slate columnist Kathryn Schulz, filmmaker Morgan Spurlock, poet Sarah Kay, Egyptian activist Wael Ghonim, and fourth grade teacher John Hunter.”

Read more of David Cowan’s guide to TED Talks 2011 over here David rated Salman Khan’s talk as 8/10

In watching the talk I was reminded about 3 ideas that have emerged as themes for me in recent times.

• Idea 1- Salman Khan says Let’s use video to reinvent education: (more below)
• Idea 2- Changing Education Paradigms – Education outside school by way of travel, exploration and rich media if extremely valuable but can be very distracting. (see Ken Robinson talk below)
• Idea3  -Many of us have huge trouble getting work done at work because of too many meetings or other “work” processes that stop us from being as productive as we can be. (see Jason Fried: Why work doesn’t happen at work – video link and my comments below.)

Salman Khan on flipping the classroom.

After he did some videos for his cousins – “they preferred him on YT to in person” – because they can learn from him at their own time and own space.

“He shows the power of interactive exercises — and calls for teachers to consider flipping the traditional classroom script — give students video lectures to watch at home, and do you “homework” in the classroom with the teacher available to help.

(Recorded at TED2011, March 2011, in Long Beach, California. Duration: 20:27)

Most intriguing we get to see Bill Gates ask Salman a bunch of questions about “the future of education” from about 17 mins onwards.

Ken Robinson on Changing Education Paradigms

I saw that Sir Ken Robinson was in Palmerston North for the Inspired Impact Teachers Conference education conference back in January 2011*. I was reminded of the animated talk given by Sir Ken Robinson at the RSA last year. (* if you were there – I would love to hear about it.)

Watch at 4:26 for some thoughts from Ken on the way that our children get all kinds of great stimulation from a huge number of sources and then when they get to school they are penalised for finding the typical class room experience boring or too slow for them.

“Our children are living in the most intensely stimulating period in the history of the earth. …besieged by information.. and we penalise them for getting distracted… from what – boring stuff at school for the most part”

Click here to view the embedded video.

Of course, there are many great teachers and parents out there doing their best for their children to help develop skills and strategies for managing all of the great resources available.

To me Khan’s work represents another step away from the book based learning that I experienced at school.

My daughter was lucky that her teacher brought a pigs brain along to school recently so that the 9 and 10 yr olds could get their science right up close and tactile. We have since supplemented that with videos and books but the shock and delight of having that physical object in the classroom will be treasured by most.

In my post last year 500m in Sight I mentioned the Digital Nation documentaries. There is an episode at the end which gives examples of video use in schools.

It is not just children that need help with managing distractions and over stimulation from media or work processes or general daily routines as Jason Fried explains.

Jason Fried on How Work doesn’t get done at work.

Work day becomes a series of work moments. Watch the excellent video below and for further reading check Paul Graham’s essays on the differences between managers and makers which I wrote about over here..

• What do you all think about these 3 ideas?
• Are Salman Khan, Sir Ken Robinson and Jason Fried onto something we need to care more about?
• How then – do we manage our time and resources better for ourselves, our work and our families?
• Important or not?

Footnote: After I wrote this post I found another example of a teacher using video to flip the classroom that was written about by Daniel Pink in September last year. That teachers name is Karl Fisch and he appears to be using the same approach as Salman Khan.

At this stage I haven’t researched the possible connections between Fisch* and Khan or if there are even any. Ideas can break out simultaneously anywhere but I do think that videos like the TED Talks series make a huge contribution to the spread of ideas.

As it turns out we have written about Fisch before as he made the video for Shift Happens. I really liked a more recent post on his blog where he talks about some of these ideas being developed in medical education as The Learning Studio.

Your homework: Chris Anderson: How web video powers global innovation

In February I was fortunate enough to be part of a dual  event held in Wellington, NZ and a week later in Melbourne.

As one of the NZ organisers we curated a number of talks on what WordPress users are doing here; as well as how they do some of that. All of the talks were good and a number of links and photos from Wellington are to be found over here.

I really enjoyed a panel discussion on the future of blogging & related matters which featured David Farrar of Kiwiblog, John Ford of Automattic, Julie Starr from Evolving Newsroom, Richard MacManus of RWW and Lance Wiggs.

Some of that was captured on video and other notes were scribbled down. I’m hoping to write up some of those key quotes when I get a moment.

What I particularly liked is the idea that you can invite a little chaos into the process and so I was delighted when DiscourseNZ duo – Ben Gracewood and Morgan Nichol agreed to come along and give a taster of their show. It was an excellent end to the day.

On Sunday we had some more hands on sessions and finished with a ukelele trio called the Custom Post Types who sang a song about CSS called the curly bracket blues. Really you had to be there

A week later I was in Melbourne for WordCamp Melbourne. It was a great event with a full range of presentations – many of whom were recorded on video – well done guys.

The video archive for #wcmelb is over here at Blip TV

As with any event like these it was very useful to hear people approaching many of the same topics from different perspectives and sharing those experiences.

At the event was Kym Huynh from WordCast who recorded a short talk with me. Ironically it lasted about 8 mins and I later did a 5 minute lighting talk covering some of the same ideas in the main room.

There was no script and it is always a little scary to see one self on video but I reckon it turned out well. I’m sure Kym did some great editing in there. (Thanks Kym)

Were you at WordCampNZ in Wellington on Feb 19th & 20th or WordCamp Melbourne on Feb 26th & 27th. I’d love to hear your thoughts.

As a music fan, I love it when I get to work with musicians on their websites.

I like it even better when I find a service that really helps musicians in practical ways. Bandcamp is that service.

The music industry business model which was really a distribution service has now been displaced by a huge increase in digital media and social technologies.

Musicians still need marketing and promotion but it is now possible to do much of this at a more of a grass roots organic level.

Most everyone knows about iTunes and if you are a musician I think you still need to be there. The real value of iTunes though is really that it is linked to a payment system that most people have access to so that is very convenient for music consumers.

However if you are an artist – it takes quite a while for payments and sales data to come through, pricing is locked and this doesn’t suit everyone.

So how does Bandcamp help with some of this?

” On Bandcamp, albums outsell tracks 5 to 1 (in the rest of the music buying world, tracks outsell albums 16 to 1).

On name-your-price albums, fans pay an average of 50% more than whatever you set as your minimum.”

I recently uploaded up 6 albums on Bandcamp for Luke Hurley and here is what we found out.

Bandcamp has a variable pricing system that is easy to use. The very first album that sold on Bandcamp sold for more than double the minimum price which is a big win if you are the musician.

For example you can still buy individual tracks at $US1 or equivalent but for an album we have set most prices at $USD8 or the equivalent of $NZ10. You may also choose to pay more. This makes it less expensive to buy albums when that suits.

1. Bandcamp also makes it easier to offer special pricing as it is more direct to the artist.
2. The share / social media embedded players are easy to use.
3. Another advantage of bandcamp is that it allows you to download other higher quality sound file types such as 320k Mp3′s, FLAC, AAC, MP3 VBR (VO), Ogg Vorbis and ALAC (so far.)  I don’t expect many people want those file types but it is a nice to have feature.

Bandcamp is very good for  sharing the music on facebook and your own websites.The Facebook share allows you to play a song in that page without taking you away from thre stream you are viewing.

Best of all though listening to the whole song before you buy beats 30 or 90 second previews on other sites.

Listen to the live Luke Hurley album Limited Liability

The stats off Bandcamp are also very useful for musicicans. There is even a stat for partial plays where the full track is not played.

And perhaps best of all – when there is a sale that $ is transferred directly to the musicians PayPal ( at the time of sale) and this makes them very happy.

There are also other complementary musiciaian services that you may use and I’d be happy to compare notes if you are looking for help.