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Kevin: The BBC’s Robin Hamman has a good scalable approach to community. As communities grow bigger, they often become unmanageable. “(The BBC) should join and support an existing conversation rather than trying to own it.”
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Kevin: Sobering article on the economics of print and new media. Vin Crosbie says that each newspaper reader is worth $500 to $1200 in revenue where each online reader is worth $8. Grow online revenue, or else.
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Kevin: Amy Gahran has a great post looking at JD Lasica’s call for better tools for citizen media. I think this isn’t just for citizen media but also for mainstream media. Blogs are better story telling tools than many CMSes. What’s with that?
Author Archives: Kevin Anderson
The day the (internet) music died?
Suw and I listen to lots of podcasts and online radio and use services like Pandora and Last.fm. We are supporters of Soma FM because we love the music especially Secret Agent. But today, Pandora, Soma and a host of other online radio sites including heavy hitters like MTV Radio, Launchcast, Real’s Rhapsody and Live365 are silent. Why? They might be priced out of the market by dramatic changes in music licencing.
As Rusty says on the Soma FM site:
Royalty rates for webcasters have been drastically increased by a
recent ruling and are due to go into effect on July 15 (retroactive to
Jan 1, 2006!). SomaFM will be liable for $600,000 in additional
royalties for 2006, and over $500,000 for the first half of 2007. As of
July 15th, we will owe $1.1 million dollars in additional royalties.
Tim Westergreen at Pandora put it this way:
Ignoring all rationality and responding only to the lobbying of the
RIAA, an arbitration committee in Washington DC has drastically
increased the licensing fees Internet radio sites must pay to stream
songs. Pandora’s fees will triple, and are retroactive for eighteen
months! Left unchanged by Congress, every day will be like today as
internet radio sites start shutting down and the music dies.
This Day of Silence is similar to another successful event in 2002 that led to the Small Webcaster Settlement Act for the period of 1998-2005.
When I first heard about this proposed rate increase, I thought back to something that Ben Hammersley said at the Guardian Changing Media conference earlier this year that entertainmentt industry was acting like someone who had just got a Valentine’s card from their lover (music and movie fans) and was ripping that card up in her face.
I’m a music fan, not a thief. I pay for music, and the music industry is yet again punishing me, a music fan. What business survives and thrives by protecting a business model by punishing the very fans that support that business model? Loyal fans will travel hundreds of miles for a concert, hunt through stacks of vinyl for that out of print record and pay money for music. Fans might not pay the margins for a download that the music industry was used to in the era of the CD, but that is an issue of margins, not passion.
But after covering the music industry years, I don’t see them letting go anytime soon. Hey, compadres back in the States, go ahead and send your member of Congress a loud and clear message. A little democracy in action. It worked back in 2002, and hopefully, it will work again. If it doesn’t, it won’t be just one day of radio silence on the internet.
technorati tags:saveinternetradio, online, music
links for 2007-06-25
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Kevin: Dave Weinberger interviews Richard Sambrook of the BBC, a very forward thinking news executive, friend and former colleague. “In this interview, Sambrook focuses not just on the new content coming from the Web but on our new ability to organize con
Newsvine and news as a social object
Thinking back to NMK, Dan Gillmor showed off Newsvine as an example of the transition from the Daily We to the Daily Me. Newsvine user Aine asked me what I thought about the site.
I’ve had an account on Newsvine for more than a year now and visit the site from time to time. I can’t say that I’m a frequent or heavy user. When I first opened the account last year, I found it difficult to understand its purpose. It didn’t have the clarity of sites such as Techmeme, Tailrank, Digg or Reddit, but I’ll be the first to cede that Newsvine was trying to do a lot more than simply recommend and vote on stories.
Thinking back to Jyri of Jaiku’s presentation at NMK, initially I thought the site wasn’t clear enough in giving users visual cues as to what to do. As Jyri said:
Define your verbs that your users perform on the objects.
However, the site has come a long way in the last year. The visual cues are stronger. The navigation and purpose seem clearer, and I’ve been impressed with the community building that the Newsvine team has done. There are few news organisations who really demonstrate the understanding of the outreach necessary to boot-strap a community site. News organisations usually focus on the content and not the community. Community doesn’t come free.
Newsvine isn’t like most news community sites, but it has features that more news sites should adopt. To encourage participation and community, news sites need to highlight the participation to encourage participation.
Another thing that has impressed me about Newsvine is how quickly the site iterates. They are constantly pushing forward new features, and for the most part, the features they have launched are focused on driving participation: The groups, the use of attention data showing what topics are hot and the live updates that make the site seem alive.
I still think that the site might be trying to do too much. I think they could do more with less. I still think that the visual cues might be stronger to guide users through the site. Maybe the site itself needs to clarify its focus a little more, but the site is a unique experiment in news as a social object.
As I said, I’m not a heavy Newsvine user. These are observations more as an observer of the Newsvine community than a member of it. I’d be interested in hearing the experience of others have had with the site.
Technorati Tags: community, journalism, media 2.0
links for 2007-06-24
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Suw: The wonderful Moo are going to be launching stickers soon – neat! But sure this should be the Hot & Stick(er)y Summer Party? I’ll be there…
links for 2007-06-23
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Suw: I actually see a lot of this “new seriousness” as Horst amusingly puts it. The Cult of Personality is a bad, bad thing.
links for 2007-06-22
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Kevin: When PR companies attack. Wow, this is one of the weirdest viral ad campaigns that I’ve ever seen. Sex in the City for condiments.
links for 2007-06-21
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Suw: This looks interesting – going to have to find time to play with this soon.
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Kevin: Ben Hammersley starts new project with the BBC to cover a story using social media. It’s an interesting experiment on what social media can mean for international coverage. I like the openness of it.
links for 2007-06-20
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Suw: Larry moves on from intellectual property to looking at how to fix the endemic ‘corruption’ of politics. Big shift, big challenge, but incredibly important. Good luck, Larry!
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Suw: Joseph Thornley write up notes of the panel session I was in at Enterprise 2.0, and makes me sound very smart. Thank you, Joseph!
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Suw: Out of the frying pan and into the fire?
links for 2007-06-19
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Suw: I am so sad that I missed Hackday – sounds like Tom and the guys put on a really amazing event. Especially impressive to see they arranged a light(ning) show too.