YouTube and recorded music

For most of my life, it has been a high crime to record a live performance by a musician. Independent of this, in the last three years, YouTube has been filled with music that is ordinarily for sale -- both studio recordings and amateur concert videos.

But one artist at least, Joanna Newsom, has ended up with an interesting approach to these two issues. I don't know whether it is her intention, but there seems to be very few or no studio versions of her songs on YouTube, but loads of videos of her in intimate theatres, halls, etc.

I think this is the right strategy. You can no longer prevent music from being shared -- whether online or sneaker-P2P. But if you let all your fans post cell-phone videos of your songs, this is fantastic publicity that cannot replace the quality of a studio recording.

PS -- check out Sawdust and Diamonds.

Saving the music album -- the studio mix tape

Bat out of Hell. Srg. Pepper. Led Zeppelin IV. The Wall.

Musicians have made a few excellent albums. But by and large the music industry has delivered a fifty-year swindle to music consumers and their comeuppance has clearly, um, come. By swindle, I simply mean when a band produces one or two excellent singles, and places them on an album with 10 or filler tracks. For literally decades, this was how it was done -- a $3 song was packaged with ten 10 cent songs and sold for $18. Magic value.

Today, these $3 songs are all on sale for $1 at iTunes. So you only buy an album if has the stature of a classic album, like The Wall, or if you just like to own physical media for some reason. The most creative response to this in my view has been to sell albums at the cash in places like Starbucks; Sheryl Crow sort of goes with the Starbucks image and if you're spending $7 on two lattes, maybe you'll spend another $15 on a CD for your car. The other approach, made famous by Radiohead, has been to sell the album on a pay-what-you-can basis; this is not a bad approach either. Certainly, if you imagine bands receiving just $1 or $2 per CD sold, then by delivering albums direct (less production and any marketing costs) it wouldn't be hard to match or beat that; heck, sell the whole album for $1.50 and then sell a bonus video for $1 -- you're already ahead.

But I thought today that there is another approach that tackles the core flaw in retail music. Perhaps the meaning of the album needs to be revisited. Instead of an album being the coherent narrative of, say, five guys in a beach house over a month, let it incorporate more than one solo artist. What I'm proposing is part way between a compilation CD and a classic album. Imagine if Sheryl Crow, Taylor Swift and ... I don't know ... KELLY CLARKSON, got together and released an album with 12 songs -- four each. There would be little or no overlap in vocals, but substantial cooperation in theme, lyrics, production, etc., so the coherence of a classic album emerges.

The album would be released with a title reflecting its narrative, not their brands -- something like Sand in the Sunscreen; -- I have no idea. But with a coherent theme and narrative there is a coherent audience; such an approach captures not only the built in audience for each artist, but also a new audience for their narrative. There's also the benefit of being so big that the publicity outweighs what it otherwise would -- a $5 million lottery prize receives an average number of purchased tickets, but a $25 million lottery prize might receive an extra $10 million worth of tickets, so that $5 million = $5 million, but $25 million = $35 million.

Or, in this case, 1+1+1 = 5.

Finally, taking such an approach and labelling it as a series -- something similar to the "unplugged" series in the 1990s -- produces an additional benefit in that consumers would come to expect the all killer, no filler quality of the product.

Note: this is my first post actually written for the Kindred Crowd blog; the previous ones were just the tech-related posts written for my personal blog.

When did bit.ly become del.icio.us?

Seriously. Props for recognizing a social media angle to what I think was just a silly side industry dominated by tiny URL until twitter got big.

Now, delicious is a personal repository and bit.ly is 2/3 tool and 1/3 social.

EDIT -- I seem to have mistaken their "history" feature for a non-existent "what's hot" feature (seemed unlikely that all that was hot was mine). Anyway, is there more value in holding their perpetual poll of websites close to their chest, or in sharing?

Taglocity -- making MSOutlook more like Gmail

I prefer Gmail because it's quicker and less bloated. But Outlook will definitely be with us for some time, and while it is, Taglocity offers a product that closes the gap a little.

I'm running Taglocity 3.0 professional edition (free trial; soon to revert to standard edition), after using the 2.0 for about eight months.

In a nutshell, Taglocity radically enhances an existing Outlook feature called "Categories." (Categories = tags). For some time, Outlook has allowed you to categorize emails, but it was clunky.

Here's how I set up and use Taglocity, after installing it:

1. Assuming you currently store your Outlook email in folders, open a folder and select all emails. Now, use the Taglocity Pane (atop your main Outlook page) to assign a tag to all items in this folder. You can just use the name of the folder, but I believe in following these conventions:
   
   
   
   
   a) don't pluralize ("report" not "reports") or capitalize, except
   
   b) capitalize acronyms ("PR", not "pr"), and
   
   c) add a hypen after tags that would otherwise form words or parts of words; e.g., "PR-" and "Toronto-". This will pay off later if you run a search for "professional". [Granted, it will fail if your email includes something like, "Toronto-based accountant"].
   
   
   
   
   
2. Go through all your folders and repeat this
3. Open your Tag Bar window (click "Tag Bar") clean up your tags. Through right-clicking you can consolidate similar tags.
4. Now, within your Tag Bar window, move the tags around into groups and then assign a colour to each group (e.g., industries are blue; administration is green; personal is yellow)
5. Still within the Tag Bar window, add a half dozen of your most popular tags to the actual Tag Bar. This bar sits atop Outlook's main page, and makes it easier to assign tags to emails.
6. Now, go back and see where you can assign more than one existing tag to an email. E.g., you have an email about a flight on Air Canada and another about consulting services to Air Canada. Tag both "air-canada" but tag one "flight" and another "consulting" or something.
7. When you've done all this, put all of your email in an "archive" folder and delete your other folders. One caveat, for repetitive projects, I prefer to use folders to tags. E.g., I write a monthly newsletter and I store material for it throughout each month; I will tag this material with the name of the newsletter, but I also store it in a folder called "May 2009" or whatever.

Yes, all of this takes some time. You may not follow all these steps for the email you received in the past. But the process demonstrates how to use Taglocity for email as you receive it. When an email arrives, once it's dealt with as a work task, you can click twice and deal with it as clutter.

Finding anything is simply about narrowing down the options -- triangulating. If, in six months, you need details about that Air Canada flight, you can use Outlook's search box to run a keyword search "category:air-canada, category:flight". Even if this produces 100 emails, you can easily scroll to the rough period of the flight. And you can combine the search with "from:dave"-type commands.

If the size of your company permits it, you can benefit from a network effect by making all of your tags public; i.e., the tags you assign to an email will travel with the email when an email is forwarded or replied to. If you invest the time to create a taxonomy for your firm, email conversations will only have to be tagged once, rather than by each recipient.

Sounds complicated, but in fact the top benefits I've experienced from using this are:

1. if you equate a tag to a folder, you can put one email in two or more "folders" at the same time, so it's easier to find regardless of how your brain is working when you need the email. E.g., you might spend a year storing email first by industry (or client) and then by service performed, and then decide you want to store by service performed first and then by industry/client within those folders. With tags, you just do both.
2. it's ridiculously quick to tag and drag emails to a single folder than to drag up and down Outlook and through nested folders.
3. though command-line searches are not popular, in fact we have all become used to them through Google; they're quite quick when you get used to them. have you ever watched someone painfully spend two or three minutes trying to find a simple email? if you can narrow the problem down by two or three tags (and perhaps a rough date), it shouldn't take more than ten or fifteen seconds to find a needle in a 10,000 email haystack.

In time, people will no doubt have personal taxonomies. You'll add 100 tags to Gmail and you'll use them for all work documents, personal documents, calendar items, emails, photos and videos, and basically any discrete piece of content you store.

The Kitchen PC -- Asus

It's not quite a fridgebook, but life is incremental.

Asus Kitchen PC.

(Does anyone else remember Commodore 64's being pushed for the capacity to organize recipes?)

Online, half a second delay is death

Link.