MY VIEW: Anti-social Behaviour

I'm worried. When Forrester comes out this week with their latest Trends paper that kicks off with, "...marketing executives and managers: Social Computing must play some role in your online strategy," how far off can the end of all this, be? I'm going to bring more evidence to the table that the cacophony of opinion noise out there will need to be controlled and funneled, or we'll miss the opportunity to tap into the most important social phenomenon ever.

Today, a poke at Sutori.com Here's a site developed by Blast Radius that is a good chem. lab experiment. Blast created it, I suspect, as a chance to stretch their Social Networking chops and see how a white page concept could come to life. You can pick up the premise by taking a read of a couple of my posts.

I've been studying the site for weeks, watching for the firestorm to ignite: the exponential growth of participation. The fuel is there: a catalyst of smart, vocal, social networking-oriented staffers. A platform that supports easy point/counter-point battles, ranking and rating to satiate the egos among the opinions.

All this, and it's not really going anywhere. Why? Certainly being small Beta, it needs some push to get it further out--I'm a client of the agency and nobody invited me to come in. Is the intention, "The Voice of Today's Customer" just too broad or uninspiring? I think what it is, is some sort of guarantee that the object of the author's derision or praise, gets the message. Blast Radius knows this because they've put a bunch of programming into supporting qualification and rebuttal from a company. However I've yet to see an official response.

The premise of the opportunity in Satori needs to be delivered on: the voice of the customer heard and responded to by the company. Otherwise, it's just another Website full of opinionated people blabbing off.

Townshend Talks Web 2.0

The old bones of The Who toddle into Vancouver this week for a concert at GM Place (I can ridicule: I saw them in the Coliseum in 1980--their very first concert after Moon's death.) What's not so pasty grey is Pete Townshend's opinions and involvement in the social networking aspects of the Web and how that's shaping his music:


"The Internet give musicians a false sense of control. I have sold music on my own website for six years. You are selling to a fan club, not to the public. There are some exceptions on the Internet, where artists have suddenly flared up across MySpace, YouTube and iTunes and got a hit, but it is rare. And that kind of hit makes very little money for the artist, only for the people running the sites and selling the ad server space. So much music is stolen, and the people responsible for this are the owners of MySpace, YouTube, and other user-group-oriented sites that are actually owned by large corporations who make their money from ad server hit rates that (with YouTube) can hit eight million a month.
"But YouTube is fun, and a place of discovery too, so it's hard to work out where the exploitation ends and the promotion begins. What I still love about the Internet is the way you can gather people together for special projects, and focus their interest (albeit briefly sometimes) on events and happenings. I published my novella The Boy Who Heard Music as a 25-week serial on a Blogspot weblog. This led directly to me completing the Who album with Wire & Glass, a mini-opera based on the novella.
"I developed the novella as I went along with feedback from about 800 readers who commented. It gave me a real feeling of being a part of a new creative community, and that my fans are often a lot smarter than I am. It was humbling and extremely valuable for me as a writer. I've since met quite a few of those people and I like and respect them. Usually when I saw their faces in the past they would be in the front row drinking beer and screaming like ice hockey fans.
{Vancouver Sun, October 7.06, F8}

MY VIEW: Music Remixes in the Networked World

I'm finding the world of remixing to be a much-needed shot in the arm of music evolution. Sure, people have been sampling (ripping off) music artists' work for about 20 years, but this is the legitimization of it. The artist surrenders the colour palate of his musical canvas and allows the fans and critics a chance to have a go. I find that in the remixes, rather than demolish the intentions of the song writer, the outcome can revalidate the brilliance of the artist.

We have experienced this before with the period of "Unplugged" when the musical artist would rearrange typically an up-tempo rock song into something softer. Quite often it opened up a whole new view of the song (See: Bryan Adams' MTV Unplugged version of I'm Ready.)

But remixes is a whole new bag. The song is stripped back to the core, pre-mixdown tracks, and packaged for download. It's like a chef walking into your kitchen and giving you the precise ingredients to their favourite dish saying, "make of it what you can." Using an application like Apple's Garage Band, you can import the individual tracks and start mixing your own favourite dish.

No surprise, my own, personal, musical genius, ,Peter Gabriel, is one of the leaders in this space. He's offering up a series of remix packages from artists that have spent time in his Real World studios. He's even run a contest for the best remix of 'Shock the Monkey'. (Being a hobbiest studio engineer, I was fascinated to hear the individual tracks of this song recorded in '81. On Peter's primary vocal track you can make out the bed tracks that are bleeding from his headphones, before the noise gate clamps down at the end of the phrases.) The contests specifically leverage social networking, as peers are invited to vote on their top 10, and comment on each remix, with Gabriel and staff reviewing them all. The Shock The Monkey contest generated 738 remixes!

Web 2.0 is enabling a direct musical relationship with artists. It is showing courage on the part of the composer to expose his or her work to public scrutiny and infact, re-interpretation of the creative material. It's also binding a village of the musically inclined as ideas and interpretations are shared. This represents a more sophisticated level of community involvement than video or photo-sharing; it's a significant shift in the way we involve ourselves in music.

Community Sites are Sticky

Wow: people are spending some serious amounts of time on the top community sites.

(This excerpt has been republished with permission from the good folks at eMarketer)