"the internet" in Weblog

Etech is over and a great time was had by all. Our presentation was dogged by technical difficulties that meant I ended up using old slides but everyone seemed to enjoy it regardless. With hindsight I think Charles and I should have been more clear with our objectives: the talk wasn’t about collective intelligence per se but rather complexity and how that effects interface decisions… Still, I really enjoyed speaking and we had loads of interesting conversations off the back of it.

And that brings me on to the most important aspect of eTech - the conversations. I’ve never found that many sharp people gathered together in one place before. Every person I met seemed to have some combination of skills outside of the norm and brought unique perspectives to bear on every topic. Here are some examples:

I chatted with Timo from Nature about getting academia more involved in sharing knowledge and community building, something he’s been doing for a while and I’ve been talking about with my friend Chris at the EES.

Charles and I talked to a chap called Karl from the Rockefeller Institute about socio-political development, the evolution of civilisations, the long tail of micro-cultures and weak signal detection.

We spent an afternoon with Peter Biddle of Microsoft discussing how the internet is effecting our culture, about what it’s like to work for Bill Gates and where his genius is as a businessman, and how Peter’s managed to carve out a semi-autonomous organisation within Microsoft. That was followed swiftly by a chat about his ideas for reverse market applications and massive medieval battles.

Over another lunch we talked to a bunch of guys about fostering types of community through design, game- and party- dynamics, and how online behaviour is bleeding into the real world.

It was an inspiring and humbling few days. I’m not used to having people not just know what I’m talking about but have had similar conversations before and already have an opinion worked out. It’s not just eTech either. I went out for Matt Buddulph’s leaving San Francisco dinner and drinks with Paul Yahoo, Richard Moo, Blaine Twitter, Tom OpenStreetMap and various Flickr and Yahoo folk. Yet again I was amazed by the level of conversation and the passion for the field we’re in. The meandering conversation ended up on whether our online personas that post twitters for acquaintances to see and comment on strangers’ MySpace pages are bleeding into the real world and changing our personalities. Don’t get me wrong - there was plenty of non-geek chat but the fact that a conversation can take such a techno-philosophical turn says something about the culture out here.

I’ve spent a lot of time arguing that London has a vibrant scene for emerging ideas but after this week I’m starting to think that I was wrong. I’ve been quite involved in bits of the London scene for a couple of years and it’s got a very different character to SF. Technology is to San Francisco what celebrity is to Los Angeles or finance is to New York and the result is a culture whose aspirations and ambitions are in sync. In London we’ve got some of the best executors in the world but do we have the innovators too?

I’ve been on MySpace for a while now, basically because loads of my friends are, but I’ve barely used it in the last 2 months, apart from checking on a few bands. It’s just too much hassle. It’s hard to wade through the hundreds of peoples’ friends looking for bands I want to check out. It’s a hassle trawling through all the spam comments and ads for clubs/bands/whatever to see what my friends are doing. But all my friends are there…

I was invited to Facebook a month or so back by a mate and I registered, spent ten minutes filling in info and then forgot about it. But in the last week it feels like there might be a change a-comin’… I’ve had maybe half a dozen friends join and all of a sudden I’m logging in regularly. With Twitter-like status, photos, the activity feeds, stories, comment threading and an interesting selection of participation functionality Facebook have done a far better job of the social stuff. It’s an easier and more fun way to keep up with my friends.

The separation of my online social community from my music one seems right - the uses are quite distinct. A lot of people happen to use MySpace just to keep up with mates though, and I suspect things are about to correct… I think both sites would be the better for it too.

The London music scene seems to be on fire at the moment! I can’t remember a time when there were more gigs to go to… In the last 10 days I’ve seen:

• Crystal Castles
• Danny Rapscallion of The Rapscallions
• Cardboard Radio
• Rosemary
• A jam session at the Macbeth
• Miss Odd Kid
• Middleman
• Sportsday Megaphone
• Metronomy
• Scout Niblett
• Bonnie Prince Billy

One interesting thing I noticed while putting together this list is that it didn’t even occur to me to try and find the bands’ own websites… I went straight to MySpace. MySpace has become the de facto standard for music urls - no mean feat. A lot of things about MySpace annoy me but I can’t argue with how simple its made it for anyone and everyone to get themselves online.

Incidentally though - everyone should check out Metronomy. They’re absolutely ace!

The Netflix $1 million competition to improve their recommendation engine has reminded me of something I said to my brother in Virgin Megastore the other night… I’d wandered in to kill some time while waiting for him to turn up for a gig, which is something I used to do a lot. I’ve spent hundreds of hours in music stores over the years. Mostly little indies but the big boys often get stuff the little chaps don’t and the sales can be interesting. What struck me this time though is that I got bored very quickly. Now that never happens to me while shopping for music! So what’s changed?

I’ve always been into fairly niche music. My vinyl addiction (now kicked) had me in and out of the hip hop shops around Brighton, Birmingham and London listening to dozens of records and chatting to other people in the shops. I’d take my stack to the desk to pay and the guy behind the counter, who I bought from and chatted to every week, would have another stack set aside for me to check out. Recommendations and pounding the pavement.

Then I moved over to buying a lot of my records from the internet. I’d chat to my mate J, who worked in a record shop in Leicester, listen to all the samples on Juno, read the Picadilly Records newsletter and make my choices. Recommentations and elbow grease.

When I stopped buying records I moved back to CDs. Both Amazon and Play do a decent job of divining my taste from previous purchases but I’ve relied a lot on late night MTV2, XFM, talking to friends and reading ArtistDirect bios to find new stuff. Over the last couple of years I’ve definitely not bought as much music as I used to. Recommendations, but more passive on my part.

In the last few months though I’ve started using Last.fm, MySpace and the iTunes Store. Last.fm, via AudioScrobbler, does an absolutely incredible job of figuring out my taste. And if I’m in a slightly different mood I can always go to the radio section and type in a few artists to get something that is outside of my normal listening preference. I also love the social aspect to it. Not from an interaction point of view but as a way of getting my friends’ recommendations at my own leisure. Every week I’ll have a browse through my friends’ profiles and listen to anything I don’t recognise. It’s social proof in its rawest form - they’re actually listening to this stuff so they must like it. If I’m taken with a track I’ll either buy through Last.fm or head to iTunes for instant gratification. I own the tracks within 30 seconds.

I use MySpace the same way - it allows me to mine my friends’ recommendations. I’ve found some great stuff just wandering through profiles. If I like what I find I’ll either download songs direct from the band’s profile or search the iTunes Store.

All of a sudden I’m back buying music again. And lots of it. I’ve bought 108 songs from the iTunes Store in the last month and that doesn’t include the stuff I’ve got from Bleep and various other MP3 stores. Most importantly though, I’m absoluitely loving it.

I reckon that I’m a classic Long Tail consumer. Yes, I’m interested in some stuff from the head, but for the most part I’m niche. If you look at my consumer behaviour over the years I fit exactly the profile that recommendation engines are trying to cater to. And I have grown to expect that kind of service. Virgin just can’t compete. It doesn’t carry the music I want and it has no way of directing me to it even if it did. Even during sales their physical products aren’t much cheaper than Play or Amazon Marketplace and I can get instant access to my purchase from iTunes or Bleep if that’s what I want. So what can they offer me? Very, very little indeed.

I thought that podcasting would take a while to take off… And by a while, I mean years. How many people have iPods? Yes lots, but how many people even have MP3 players? Still not a majority. Of those iPod owners how many know how to add podcasts from anywhere other than the iTunes music store interface? Very, very few, I think. It took me ages to find that text box hidden away in a dropdown into which I could paste feed urls. That means that the vast majority of podcasts, those further down the popularity curve (Long Tail anyone?!), will remain obscure. This morning it occurred to me that I might be wrong though.

The BBC is advertising podcasts on its World Service. News bulletins, documentaries, the works are all up for download. They were experimenting with this stuff when I freelanced for them 3 years ago but I just hadn’t noticed how completely they’d embraced it. With that sort of exposure, on a global scale, podcasts could be tipped (buzzword bingo!) into the mainstream far sooner than I was predicting…

I’ve been using Rojo as my RSS reader for about a year now and I love it. I use a tiny fraction of its functionality, to be honest, but it does exactly what I want. I particularly like its recommendation engine - I can click on ‘My feeds’ and be shown entries ordered by my likely interest in them, which suits me much better than strict chronology thanks to the time pressure I’m normally under.

But of everything I most enjoy the weekly Rojo Newsletter. It’s an edited aggregation of the weeks happenings according to the blogosphere. It exposes me to more stuff than I would see in a strictly pull system. I actually think it might be replacing Sunday magazines for me…

I don’t follow the news as closely as I’d like, thanks to time. Being a web professional I have to spend a lot of my weekly reading time keeping up to date with emerging techniques in my field. I used to buy the Sunday papers for a summary of the weeks events and I particularly like the Sunday papers’ magazines. The in-depth articles the magazine format offers help to bring me back up to date with the stories I’ve only followed vaguely. The Rojo Newsletter gives me an overview of what’s been going on but the web format gives me links to more and more and more detail, if I want it.

It’s hard to say how representative I am of other peoples’ reading habits but I can really see more people moving over to this style of news consumption.

I was listening to my favourite podcast (Radio SubPop) today and it got me thinking… It’s a series of tracks given away by a record label. Why? Aren’t they reducing their artists’ saleability by giving away all this music? They get none of the licensing money that they would from radio either and there are no adverts to sweeten it for them. What’s in it for them?

I remember being told by one of my friends that hardly anyone makes money from an indie single (unless you are Gnarles Berkeley) - they’re tools to help promote the album. Releasing a single requires a lot of effort: design, promotion, distribution. All for 500-2000 units shifted… It must be incredibly time consuming.

Now consider a podcast. It’s almost free to run and you have a base of subscribers from your target market receiving your music regularly. That must be the most cost effective album promotion possible. Consumers get some free music, the labels get some free promotion and everyone’s happy.

There are a couple of catches though. Where do they get these subscribers from in the first place? Some promotion is therefore required. Further into the future, what happens when podcasts have become a mainstream medium? Surely it’ll become increasingly difficult to get noticed as the big labels wade in with their hefty wallets. And finally, podcasts suffer from the same problem as RSS - pull technology reduces serendipidy. Why would you subscribe to a labels’s feed if you don’t know their music already?

So podcasts have their problems but the labels to crack them will have a year or more’s head start on the rest of the game… So far I’ve bought 4 albums after hearing singles on the Radio Subpop podcast and it’s not cost them anything to get me hooked.

I released a new article on Monday called Playing Nice with the Other CSS Kids. As always, I’ve been watching its progress around the internet community very closely. Having done this a few times now I’ve noticed a very distinct pattern to the spread emerging.

Once the article was up on Content with Style I emailed a few people: css-d, 456 Berea Street, CSS Beauty, CSS Vault and a few others. No spamming, just a few personal emails to folk I genuinely thought would be interested in the subject. As it turns out, most of them were interested. Both Roger Johanssen and Alex Giron linked it up immediately and that’s when the fun started.

I kept an eye on the log files over the following couple of days… ALL the links in the first day were from CSS Beauty and 456 Berea Street, and that really is a testament to the following those sites have earned themselves. Even though the article only got linked from the side notes of each, the traffic was phenominal. Off the back of those two links Playing Nice with the Other CSS Kids made it onto the del.icio.us Most Popular list, which, as I’ve seen before, proved to be the tipping point.

From the moment the article made that list, the traffic shifted. The Most Popular list feeds on itself - the higher up the list you are the more people see your article and the more people bookmark it. And on and on.

Over the last day the traffic has calmed down and the inbound traffic has diffused - now coming from personal blogs and forums. Some of these sites are far less subject-specific than the original sources.

This is only a very small example but it illustrates perfectly the idea of ‘thought leaders’ and ‘points of infulence’. PR and marketing people will already be well aware of this concept but though I have come across the idea many times I’d never really thought about it in a practical way.

This feels like a real democratisation of information to me. If your content is useful and/or interesting then it can gather a large audience very quickly with a little help from these ‘thought leaders’.

I’m told that this is how many Sun press releases are put out these days. The head of communications sends out an email to a handful of journalist acquanitances and if they are interested, they spread the word.

Communications departments should be paying attention…

When the JCB song video did the rounds a few weeks ago I was completely charmed. I watched it through several times, ordered the album and then spent a while browsing the Monkeehub website. That’s every marketing man’s dream! Not only did I buy the product I also spent time looking up others involved.

Now, I’ve bought albums based on videos before - I have a notepad that I carry around with me that has band names and song titles scrawled all over it, but I don’t think the experience has ever been this easy. Because I saw the video online, it was only a couple of short clicks to get everything I needed… Offline it’s more of a chore: I get distracted, something else comes along, whatever. This one medium approach is something I’ve never come across before.

Are we going to see more of this kind of thing? What is the audience of MTV2? I’m told it’s relatively small… The catch is that to flourish on the web either the song or the video have to be something special, so that rules out a lot of the major label signings. Monkeehub did an absolutely incredible job, perfectly matching the tone of both the music and the lyrics, and the song itself is great. I’m not such a fan of the rest of the album, to be honest, but my point is that the online promo did something I very rarely do: go straight out and spend my money.

I would dearly love to know how Nizlopi’s sales have done since that video started circulating.

So, Google vs Microsoft then? It sounds like this is going to be more interesting than I was expecting… The leader in findability and online advertising vs the leader in consumer platforms.

While I was setting up my brother’s computer a couple of weeks ago I had to unplug my desktop from my home network… Until that point I hadn’t really noticed how little use I have for a computer without the internet. I reckon that about 80% of the time I spend at my computer relies on an internet connection. Now I come to think of it, the ease with which I adjusted to my iBook bears testimony to this as well. Once I had my mail and internet connection set up, with a bit of synchronisation here and there, I felt at home.

So for me, and probably many others, useful computing depends on the internet. All I need is a few key apps and I can work on any platform…

My money’s on Google.