How could we have gotten 15 years into the development of the web and not addressed this fundamental disadvantage vs shopping in person?  Well, my thought is basically that this shortfall was not made apparet until the new surface area of business-with-consumer (not business-TO-consumer) communications were created via myspace/facebook/twitter/etc.

There is a huge opportunity to envelop customers tastes, contributions and personality into ecommerce sites rather than purely tacking them on at the end of the design/UX process.

As an example of a starting point, do you know those product registration cards included with electronics that sometimes you fill out and definitely never get any value from?   Maybe those could be revised to offer a unique ID that consumers could use to drive traffic to a specific site, a la a low-investment affiliate program. If I can send people to companyname.com/customer/jeremymeyers and also customize what people see (model numbers, reviews, links) once they get there, you’ve involved me as a customer and an advocate, created a new traffic stream to your site, and treated me special.

As usual, a leader in this particular concept is Threadless (my favorite ecommerce site on the web).  I have a page on Threadless thats all about me. Here, check it out.  It can pull in feeds from other sites, and i can post blogs about products I’ve purchased, which show up on the products page.  They also have a built-in affiliate program which they call “street team”. Referrals which lead to sales earn me $3 in store credit.

All of these are really simply implemented ideas that will create a much ROI and ROE.

In order not to be left in the dust by sites like Threadless, eCommerce sites (and consumer goods sites in general) would be very wise to reconceptualize their online presence to envelop their users and include them in the building of the site from the ground up, rather than allow them to comment on content generated internally.

Have you seen any other great examples of customer envelopment? Please share in the comments!

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Here are some things that really piss me off (not just me, either)

• If you’re at a conference that you paid to get into?  Be at the conference.  Don’t spend 90% of your time tweeting what the people on stage are saying.  You’re not a participant, you’re a court reporter.  And it annoys the HELL out of people who follow you because you’re making an assumption that they’re interested in whats going on at this conference enough to eat up some significant portion of their real estate.
• Here are some topics that you can just shut up about right now.
  • I’m interesting, so everyone must be interested in how I use twitter. (also known as ‘hey I joined a site,I must be an expert!) syndrome
  • Number of followers don’t matter even though I have thousands and that’s why I’m here attending/speaking at this conference
  • The shifting business paradigm making it so much easier to get paid to chat all day.
  • Listening is the new talking even though I’m talking about listening without actually listening
  • Posts entitled “What _____ can teach us about social media”? Shut up. Not everything is about Social Media. The world is bigger than that. Filtering everything through the SM lens narrows the ability of people to take larger messages, lessons and tools from the things going on around.  And isn’t that the point?
  • Just because a company has a PR mishap or doesn’t do something according to your own arbitrary rules of how companies should be run (whether or not you’ve ever worked in the industry in question, at a company of that size, or at a company at all), doesn’t mean they FAIL or that it’s a CATASTROPHE or and they’re OBVIOUSLY OUT OF TOUCH. Shut up. Nobody wants to read your blog posts about it except other people like you.

We get it. That’s why we’re using the site.

Also: DO something. If you can’t cite specific examples of ways you’ve used stuff you’re talking about to help a company you work for? Shut up.  You know what helps people to learn? Show, don’t tell.

It is your job to provide the maximum value per-interaction as possible, right? That’s what it says on your linkedin profiles? If your value proposition (I think I just threw up in my mouth a little) to people who pay attention to you (be it online or in person) is spouting confucian words of wisdom about marketing and being a stenographer in rooms full of people also being stenographers (especially if you complain about people getting information for free that you paid for), then maybe you shouldn’t be a Social Media rockstar in the first place.

How did a group of people that are supposed to be all about effective communication of ideas and authentic interpersonal relationships devolve into such self-congratulatory ego-fed bullshit?  As @davewiner has taken to saying: “Dude! No One Cares!”

STFU and GBTW.  And no, your job isn’t building your personal brand.

Rant over.

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On September 11th, I lived on Bond Street, which is a few miles from what later became known as Ground Zero.

Needless to say, I was front-and-center for the raw emotion, shock and pain in the immediate aftermath. Plenty has been said on every scale about that part.

What was maybe a little less focused-on was New Yorkers immediate response to each other.

There has always been an underlying sense of camraderie between the people who manage to make it work living here, even through our brusqueness, seeming indifference and occasional shouting matches with cabbies.  I’ve always been proud to call myself a native New Yorker.  What came out in the weeks and months after the event was a bubbling to the surface of the connections that had previously been understood but not acted upon.  People everywhere were actively connecting with each other through this new ’safe space’ that made it okay.

While that safe space has receded somewhat in the months and years following, I think any New Yorker would agree the city has increased the conscious level of connection between its citizens, which is a positive effect of an otherwise horrendous event.

Watching this movie made me start to think about the safe space that was created, and the value that it brought to the community.  What can each of us do to create a shared experience and a safe space to connect?

One of the best micro-examples of what I’m talking about appears in a segment of the Jimmy Fallon show they call “Shared Experiences,” in which Jimmy, The Roots, the guests and the studio audience all share in something silly (like wearing Slankets, or crazy sunglasses).  It may seem like just a bit, but by including everyone in a single act, intimate connections are made, people are valued and we are all left with more of a sense of unity than we started out with.

One of the true tests of the net effects of so-called Social Media and new tools like Facebook, Twitter, and the internet as a whole will be when we create a measurable effect on the circumstances by which we all identify with each other as part of a community, a city, a country, a planet, a species.  That’s when we will truly be changing the world.

And thats when the terrorists lose.

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Jamie.

My friend Jamie Dordek died yesterday.  Normally I wouldn’t share such news on my blog, but it so happens that I’d only met her once.  She was someone that I’d gotten to know mostly through Twitter and IM.  Her passion for life and all that it had to offer was truly an inspiration.  We would sit and talk for hours on IM and the phone about music and life and cooking and anything else that happened to make its way into our conversation. I’m so saddened that I will never get to make her the mix CD I promised.

Many have said it before, much more eloquently than I could ever could, so I will just say this:  Social Networking sites connect us to people.  There are so many relationships that I know I value that have started on silly websites like Facebook and Twitter and Myspace and OKcupid and Match.  They are real, whether you’ve spent time with the person in “real life,” just talked to them over the phone, or just online.  All these relationships mean something.  That fact is never more pronounced than when someone is suddenly gone.

There arent ever the right words to say when something like this happens.  The standard response is “I’m sorry,” but that doesn’t really convey what really happens when a hole is made in your life.

So, it was a pleasure to have had Jamie in my life, we were all richer for her existance, and the world lost a killer smile this week.

So long, kid.

Safe travels.

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2. Give more than you get.

3.  …there is no step 3.

Anything else is BS designed to sell books and drive AdSense impressions.

Class dismissed.

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When interacting with a company, our intent as end-users is rarely, if ever, based on figuring out how to give them money.  Mostly, our interactions are based on getting a need or a want addressed as efficiently as possible.  This is, more often than not, in direct conflict with the implicit (if not explicit) intentions of the companies we are interacting with.  This conflict of intents, historically ‘part of the cost of doing business,’ has become much more of an active topic of conversation online and offline, which is having an ever-increasing impact on our overall perception of companies and our willingness to engage with them (e.g. spend our money with them)

An obvious example of a decision made in conflict is DRM.   The intent of the business (protecting their self-perceived ‘most important assets’ from their customers) was in direct conflict to the customers intent (purchasing music in a manner that gives them ownership of their copy).  Instead of being interested in interacting with their consumers, the entertainment industry defaulted to treating each and every one of us like potential criminals, and attempts to engage were ignored or met with legal action.  Choosing instead for your businesses intent to involve an active and genuine interest in people, communities and behavior, asking questions, and generally being interested leads to much longer term gains and sustainability (something companies that have embraced DRM are struggling with right now).

My friend Amber Naslund recounts a story about how the Jurys Boston Hotel picked up on something she said on twitter about her experience there and took the time to email to thank her for her mention and (something Amber glossed over a bit but I think is so important) took an interest in her as a person via email, followed up with her to learn more, and set her up to have an awesome experience the next time.  This resulted in the creation of a new and powerful customer evangelist.  In Amber’s words, posted to a block with :

I have a hotel in Boston that feels very much “mine”. Why would I stay somewhere else when I know the people, and feel like they’re genuinely happy when I come back again?

If Jury’s Boston had simply stuck to the ‘be a hotel where people give us money to have somewhere to sleep’ intent, she most likely would have had a perfectly fine time and probably not given it the thought to dedicate the home page of her site to the experience.  By taking the time to listen, learn and reorient their intentions to match (and exceed) hers,  Jury’s Boston created an experience for her that earned both her loyalty, trust and her voice to others.  For this interaction, the intent of the company was to create a great experience for Amber, and to fufill her needs.   Jury’s is, of course, a business, and would have been happy to take her money and move on.  They decided, for this interaction at least, that their intent was to make the interaction more personal.  Total cost to them: One phone call.  Total return:  A fan for life, with incentive to share the experience with her friends, followers, everyone who reads her blog, each of whom now have a hotel in mind to stay at when they’re in Boston.

Companies may look at this concept and respond with trepidation.  “The whole purpose of a company is to increase its own bottom line, otherwise it wouldn’t exist!” is a popular response.  While this underlying statement may be true, the intent of how one reaches profitability is something that is much more flexible than most companies think.  The challenge lies when they have been set up in a way that leaves no room for taking an interest when providing a service or bringing a product to market.  It is not a question of willingness, but actually deciding to take the time and effort to address a lack of room in the workflow for genuine human interest and curiosity.

So, take a look (and, more importantly, a listen) around where you work.  During the course of the day, how much time is spent in your company being interested in customers?  Pay attention to how interactions with end users are phrased.  Are people interested in connecting, or are they more interested in “identifying target audiences” and “demographics and psychographics” to the exclusion of other things.  I think you’ll find the vocabulary very telling.

What bit of information would you like to share with companies that could make for a more compelling engagement with you? Are they giving you a place to tell them?  Are they interested?

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Media companies by and large have become complacent and lazy, believing their own hype, and (most importantly) believing that they are the only ones who can affect the market for what they’re selling and how.

This particular combination of traits, combined with a healthy disinterest and sometimes even contempt for their customer base (”look what we made them buy AGAIN”) has lead to panic and frequent legal action when the paradigm has shifted via external means.  For example (and this will be the only time I pick on the music industry specifically):

Home taping is killing music

Similarly, when the VCR was starting to become widely available, then head of the MPAA Jack Valenti gave this testimony before Congress¹

“‘I say to you that the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone.’ Jack Valenti said this in 1982 in testimony to the House of Representatives on why the VCR should be illegal. He also called the VCR an “avalanche” and a “tidal wave”, and said it would make the film industry “bleed and bleed and hemorrhage”.

..and of course by 1999, the $16 billion home video industry represented 55% of studios’ domestic revenues, while box office revenues were 22%²

What we’ve seen time and time again is that every time there’s a disruption, media companies first response is to scream bloody murder, try to “unring the bell” of whatever new disruption has caught them off guard (whether it’s Napster, the Kindle, Twitter, BitTorrent, Bloggers covering political events), send lawyers after them and basically do everything an autistic child does when confronted with change they don’t like..

I’m here to say here and now:  Shut the %^#& up and Get Back To Work.

Each of the examples mentioned above were opportunities for each industry to take a close look at themselves and see what their core value was, identify and address consumer needs, and use 21st (and late 20th) century tools to work both harder AND smarter.   Each sector could’ve reinvented itself in the mold of JetBlue, who defines itself repeatedly as “a customer-service company that happens to fly airplanes”³.  Instead what has happened in the last 10 years is basically “We know best.  Trust us.” and a lot of head-in-the-sand nonsense.

What’s sad is that companies lack of willingness to take ideas from outside themselves, inability to adjust in a meaningful way to the flattening of the information/access/publishing/sharing curve, and continued hubris in the face of ever-declining revenues has failed to register at the upper echelons of these companies in any meaningful way, and instead has lead to arguments like the one posed by The Authors Guild in opposition to Kindle 2’s new text-to-speech renderer, which allows Kindle owners to hear a mechanized voice ‘reading’ Kindle-purchased books.

“Bundling e-books and audio books has been discussed for a long time in the industry. It’s a good idea, but it shouldn’t be accomplished by fiat by an e-book distributor,”. “They don’t have the right to read a book out loud,” said Paul Aiken, executive director of the Authors Guild. “That’s an audio right, which is derivative under copyright law.”⁴

…as if the market for Patrick Stewart reading Dickens would suddenly shrivel and die because a speech algorithm could also pronounce ‘Bob Cratchit’.  As if the publishing industry has done anything to futher the audiobook side of things (free podcasts of the first chapters of classic works and upcoming titles? no.  Including download cards in hardcover editions? no.).  In fact, the only thing book publishers have done in the audio space is to give control over and license all their content to…guess what, a third-party distributor, audible.com!

This all goes back to my original point about companies being LAZY (note that I do not mean that the people within them do not work hard).  The same tired interruption-based campaigns that used to work due to lack of alternate options are retreaded over and over for the same tired variations on products, with encouragement to “think outside the box” …but not too far outside, not if it conflicts with the business model.  Metrics are hard-won and not truly analyzed.  Scapegoating abounds.

Discovering, encouraging and empowering an audience is hard work.  The tools for doing this are just beginning to realize themselves.  Now is the time for bold experimentation, not for complaining when the old ways of gaining an audience cease to be effective.  Seth Godin priced the eBook for his “Tribes” book at 99 cents, and now it’s the most downloaded eBook in the history of eBooks.  This isn’t rocket science.

It’s unfortunate that so many skilled, forward-thinking people have been laid off due to the inability of industries to change course.

So, I say unto thee:  Shut The F$%^ Up and Get Back To Work .  Hire a person, heck hire a team of people who can implement a system to figure out what the scary people out there (you know, the people that pay your salaries with their disposable income) expect from you, what they want, what would make them happy.  Listen to the results.  Change the course of your industry’s future.  Your whole reason for existing is to make customers happy.  Your whole reason for existing is to make customers happy. And it’s really not that hard!  If you have lots of VPs who sit around in meetings, fire some of them.  Take the money from their salaries and hire smart people who know how to mine the internet world for actionable information.  Start from the very beginning, see what pisses people off about your company, and fix it.  See what people like about what you do, expand upon it. Time is running out.

You say people are stealing your content, that new technologies will ruin your business, that they must be stopped or DRMed or lobbied against or sued or region-locked or put in jail (seriously?).  I say “figure out a way to listen and get relevant again” or, more succinctly… STFU and GBTW.

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1. via Mark Reeder and Slashdot
2. via Video Software Dealers Association via allbusiness.com
3. via WSJ Classroom
4. via WSJ and eweek.com

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Bill Hicks was (and is still) one of the sharpest minds in comedy of all time.  From religion to politics to drugs to sex, his acid tongue deconstructed the hypocrisy and conveyed a sharp anger about life that was just as thought-provoking as it was hilarious.

Here’s Bill at the peak of his powers on “One Night Stand”

[via The Naked Gord Program]

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Could you please slow down just a bit?

The rise of blogs, micro-content, sites like tumblr and posterous, RSS, and others have made it very simple for anyone to publish their thoughts online. As it turns out, there are thousands of interesting people posting all kinds of informative and interesting information on thousands of different topics on thousands of different websites, and every time I stumble across another one of them, my curious mind wants to poke around and read all the articles, and then I look up and its 4am and I have to get up at 7.

So I implore you, Internet. Stop being so interesting.

Somewhere along the way we hit a tipping point where there’s way more stuff out there that I’d be interested in reading, listening to or watching than minutes in the day to read, listen to or watch them. It makes me kinda sad that I won’t ever get to all of the posts that would enrich my life. I hope that this one and the others on my blog have enriched yours in some small way.

I guess there are worse problems to have…

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First off, I’d like to posit that we are not only in a recession, but what we’re seeing is the result of the inability and unwillingness of major swaths of the corporate infrastructure to address the shift from relatively uneducated consumers who have respond mostly to advertising, celebrity endorsements, and lack of opportunities to get information.

With the exponential growth of information online and how easy its become for people to share their experiences, opinions (both good and bad) and recommendations with friends and an almost unlimited number of strangers (see Yelp, Twitter, Blogs in general), these businesses stumble and fall.

Each industry is based on business practices that:

• Show apathy or even contempt for their customer base (here’s what we make, buy it..where else are you gonna go)
• Have relied on a historical lack of alternate options (pre-Napster, lack of competitive foreign cars until recently)
• Are resistant to internal change and innovation (electric cars, hybrids, DRM, etc)

Unfortunately, this kind of business strategy (what they don’t know won’t hurt us) has been the backbone of some of the most central industries in our country, and the failure of the process is taking a devastating toll.

All is not doom and gloom, however.  There has never been a better opportunity for industry to shift our strategy from a business-centric customer-be-damned model to a customer-focused, service-oriented one.  The few exceptions in each of the aforementioned areas (JetBlue, for example) are not suffering as much because they’ve positioned themselves and behave as a customer service company that also happens to be an airline.

This is all well and good coming from me, seeing as I am employed and know how I’m going to pay my next rent check, but another thing I find fascinating and optimistic about our current crisis is that it also overlaps with another pressing issue, the environment.

We have millions of skilled laborers, engineers, mechanics, accounting people, number crunchers out of jobs right now.  Where is there a shortage of exactly those kind of people?  INFRASTRUCTURE.  It seems to me that with the right training, people who worked 20 years building carborators could very easily be building solar panels, or wind turbines, or bridges or working on the electrical grid.  And so on and so on.

Hence, my overall conclusion that this is not just a recession, but a transformative period in American industry.

I only hope the systems can be put in place to make available these Green jobs to people who sorely need them.

Obviously, these examples are an oversimplification of a highly complex issue, but I’m very excited to see what the immediate future holds for where American workers are headed.

[Inspired by Jeff Jarvis: A fundamental restructuring is underway]
[for more: Bruce Nussbaum: The Transformation Conversation: Is "Transformation" a Better Concept Than "Innovation" to Guide us Forward?]

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First, let’s define what the Twitter platform is.

Twitter = Length-constrained globally accessible Pseudo-IM that’s tribes-enabled and logged, featuring content-based networking tools. That’s a mouthful so let’s break it down

• Length-Constrained: Each posting on twitter can only be up to 140 characters long (including spaces, punctuation, etc)
• Pseudo-IM: Short bursts of conversational content. Thoughts, feelings, musings, inspiration, funny links, etc.
• Globally accessible: By default, anyone in the world can see any of your postings to the site.  More importantly, anyone can respond to them and engage you directly.
• Tribes-enabled: My definition, based on Tribes: We Need You To Lead Us by Seth Godin, is based around Twitter’s “follow” functionality, which allows any user to “follow” any other user, so that their updates appear in their incoming stream of content.  Unlike Facebook or Myspace, you do not need to confirm someone in order for them to start receiving your content.   As you build your tribe, you have several ways of interacting.

1. You can post a message out into your ’stream’ which anyone following you or searching can read
2. You can direct a message at someone but still have it reside in your public feed by preceeding the message with an @username (e.g. “@jeremymeyers Your new blog post is awesome!”
3. If you are following someone and they are also following you, you can send them a private message that only they can see.

• Logged: Public conversations are on twitter.com indefinitely, so they can be referenced in the future.  In fact, the definition above came from something I posted on December 12th.
• Content-based networking tools: This is where it gets interesting.  Twitter features a pretty robust search engine, allowing you to search not only for people, but for anything anyone has ever posted to the site.  This makes finding interesting people saying remarkable things about topics you are interested in very simple.  And since there’s no barrier to engagement, you can follow them and say hi immediately.

This may seem to some like a fancy way of pushing out Facebook updates, but as more and more interesting people join and start using the service a remarkable thing starts happening.  The old barriers to being able to contact people fall away.  Imagine this scenario:  You’re a writer with a book almost completed and no contacts in the publishing industry.  You go on twitter and notice that the VP of Editorial at Bantam has a twitter account. You can go and see what they’re thinking about, who they’re talking to, what’s interesting to them.  Then you can engage them in authentic communication, build up a relationship, and before you know it you have a friend who can help you out.

Now imagine being able to do this with Rachel Maddow (@maddow).  Or Adam Savage from Mythbusters (@donttrythis).  Or potential Surgeon General Sanjay Gupta (@cnnhealth), or ?uestlove from The Roots, or the guys behind Threadless.com.

I think what I really love about twitter is its a great democratic equalizer.  We’re all just people, and we’re there to make connections that allow us to give and receive value.  Twitter makes it easy to find people who are into what you’re into, and want to have great conversations and debates and grow and learn.  If you use it right, your life can be affected in any number of ways.

Pro Tip: If you find yourself using the site with any regularlity, I suggest using the free program TweetDeck as your interface into it. Its dashboard system makes keeping track of the various threads of conversation much easier than twitter.com’s own website.

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Upon thinking about it and discussing with a few folks, I present them here, unabridged, with the thought that some of you may find a few of them useful to yourselves.

Jeremy’s Resolutions for 2009

• Collaborate more, professionally and personally. Engage others and allow myself to be engaged with.
• Trust, share and value my emotions during the course of every day.
• Spend more time with friends in person (especially if travel is necessary), reconnect with peripheral people.
• Treat myself and the world around me with more love and respect.
• Go after what I want without letting fear stop me. Say yes more than I say no.
• More precisely define my passions, figure out how to make them more core to my day-to-day existence.

Your feedback, additions, thoughts are very welcome.

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[Thanks, MuppetCentral!]

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I’ve been keeping a similar list since 2001 (you can see the last 3 years on the sidebar of this blog). Every year narrowing down the list to 10 becomes a challenge. There’s so much great music out there.

Every year it amazes me, upon reading people’s lists, just how much music I haven’t heard, although I consider myself someone who keeps up with a ton of it in many different genres. Through the miracle of Rhapsody, the last few weeks of December are spent queueing up dozens of albums that others love that are totally new to me.

One of the best discoveries I’ve made so far is an album called Glider by the band The Sight Below, on the amazing Ghostly International.

I will not attempt a full review here, but suffice it to say this is hauntingly beautiful beat-based ambient reminiscent of things like Hammock and a less sample-filled KLF “Chill Out”.

You can listen for free via Lala (I <3 the freakin internet)

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In no particular order:

1. Johann Johannsson - Fordlandia (4ad) (just insanely gorgeous)
2. Jesu - Why Are We Not Perfect (hydrahead) (the denser more active counterpart to JJ)
3. Dear and the Headlights - Drunk Like Bible Times (EVR) (second time this band has been on my list… great The Band-influenced indie rock)
4. The Weepies - Hideaway (Nettwerk) (Now one of my favorite indiepop/singer-songwriter albums of all time)
5. M83 - Saturdays=Youth (Mute) (lush and beautiful in that 80s shiny way. Nostalgia that’s also a reinvention)
6. Santogold - Santogold (downtown) (Everything that I dont see about M.I.A. I see with Santi)
7. Sun Kil Moon - April (Caldo Verde) (Every top 10 list needs a somber poor-me album for depressives. Nobody does it better than Kozelek. Meditative.)
8. Robyn - Robyn (EMI) (best pure pop record this year)
9. Ida - Lover’s Prayers (polyvinyl) (another pretty m/f duet indiepop record, this more melancholy than The Weepies but equally worthwhile)
10. The Hush Sound - Goodbye Blues (decaydance/fueled by ramen) (gets the Nellie McKay schizophrenic-influence indierock award, and a great way to come out of the meditative/depressive coma of some of my other records. Also a heavy Carole King influence which is awesome.)

Runners-up:
Kylie Minogue - X (one of her strongest outings in ages, not as much replay value as Robyn tho)
Los Campesinos - Hold On Now, Youngster (i remember this being a great record, haven’t listened to it since it came out)
Raphael Saadiq - The Way I See It (Columbia) (great record)
Mercury Rev - Snowflake Midnight (awesome awesome sparkly record, sadly only room for 10. if you haven’t heard it, hear it.)

Most disappointing: Ben Folds … dude… wtf.
Best early ‘09 record i’ve heard because I work in the biz: Derek Trucks Band (seriously funky stuff)
Albums I’m looking forward to in 09: Paper Route, the inevitable Amy Winehouse disaster breakup album, NEW A CAMP RECORD OUT ON MY BIRTHDAY VIA NETTWERK.
Best album from 07 that shouldve been on my list but i didn’t hear until 08: Lucky Soul (ruffa Lane) (insanely catchy Cardigans-meets-Phil-Spector stuff)
Best album i’ve rediscovered from my collection: The Autumns - The Autumns
Music-related thing i’m most proud of having done in 2008: Tie between
Thrillercast and 60 Second Soundtracks

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I started this blog post with the intention of writing about why Rhapsody and Napster have had a hard time breaking through into the iTunes-dominated marketplace, but about halfway through a point dawned on me that maybe even the ppl at those companies haven’t thought about.

Streaming services are the “functionality” side to music blogs “content” side.

iTunes has been successful because their interface is built around editorial picks, and generally stuff that will direct you to a particular album/video/movie/podcast/etc.Streaming services have never been particularly strong in this area, mostly as a function of the lack of a barrier to “just play anything”. Drawing focus to particular items in their available catalog is counter to the whole point of the experience.

However, there are places online that are very strong in drawing focus at particular items within their enormous catalog: Music Blogs. There are thousands of people who are interested enough in music and what’s going on to dedicate significant time and resources toward filtering content for other people.

If Rhapsody were to position itself as “the music blogger’s best friend” or “no post is complete without a RhapLink”, or something about “the flipside of the coin”, I think their overall listenership/usage would go up.

There are two particular tribes that should be pointed toward streaming services:

1. Music geeks with a wide-ranging knowledge of different genres and know what they want to listen to at any one point but don’t want to lug their collection around with them
2. People interested in learning about music from external sources (blogs, last.fm, hypemachine, friends, etc) and then reaping the rewards

As a P.S. One of the big frustrations for streaming service users is the inability for Last.Fm to track their listens. Listening to a song over Rhapsody ends up not ‘counting’ as much as from CD or a file. It turns out theres a quick and free DLL plugin called ScrobRhapsody that will connect your Rhapsody client to your Last.Fm software

For an interesting alternate take on this, check out what Bob Leftsetz had to say about Rhapsody needing to pitch itself as a luxury item.

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What if Facebook only allowed you 75 friends

The continued rise of Twitter.com has been attributed to many things by many people. Beyond the ambient intimacy, portability, business uses, networking, simplicity, etc, is one thing that may not have been blogged about quite as much: In a bandwidth-is-cheap storage-is-cheap development-is-cheap world, setting limits can create freedom.

Twitter.com limits all conversation atoms (a unit of measure for posts, replies, direct messages) to 140 characters. That’s it. No exceptions. This forces atoms to be succinct, without artifice or flowery stuff or suckuptitude or any of that capital-m-Marketing that more freedom allows.

Turns out that setting limits is a pretty effective way to get people to say what they want to say and then sit back. I’d be very interested to see what effect putting the 10 minute time limit on YouTube videos did for overall creativity, usage, and density of videos created over time. (paging Mediaeater, can Trendrr demonstrate that).

Being social network fatigued as I am (seriously, if one more site asks me to enter my email address, then upload a photo, then shout at my gmail contacts, I’m quitting the internets.), I hope this trend will expand. Another site that is doing something interesting with this paradigm is 12seconds.tv, which is exactly what it sounds like: Create and share videos, each limited to 12 seconds. From their FAQ:

Why only 12 seconds
Because anything longer is boring. The scientists here at the 12seconds dodecaplex have conducted countless hours of research to determine the precise amount of time it takes for boredom or apathy to set in during typical Internet video viewing. Our patent pending Electro-Tear-Duct Prongers have determined that exactly 12 seconds of video is the ideal amount of time to keep anything interesting.

Note to people with pre-existing sites:Imposing limits where users are USING a particular featureset is a BAD IDEA. Don’t do it, and if you do, don’t say I didn’t warn you.

So there you have it, sports fans. If you’re thinking of launching a new site with community function or content creation abilities, maybe you should think about using a limit as a feature.

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Couldnt’ve said it better myself.

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The podcast format didn’t really start to break through until Adam Curry (@adamcurry) began pushing it as an original content format with his Daily Soure Code series, still going strong. But it wasn’t until April of 2005 when Apple added native podcast support in iTunes 4.9 that there became any chance of the format growing.

I really started paying attention to the format as a potential channel for compelling original content in 2006, when someone at work introduced me to Joe Vella, a long time jazz new media guy (remember JazzOnln.com? That was him) who found himself wanting to create content for the web that was intimate and told a story in a way that had been lost since the consolidation of radio. We started doing a series for Yo-Yo Ma, continued on to some Broadway titles, and at the moment we’ve got about 100 episodes created ranging from a 28-episode series about Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” (which I’m really proud of) to another 25 episodes around Stephen Sondheim.

Stay tuned for Part 2 (which is much more interesting): The WHY.

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OK fine, so it’s a confluence of two of my favorite things. Whatever. Watch and enjoy the new video for “Can’t Go Back Now” directed by Brad Aldous

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