“The Eleatic Stranger: Let us consider, in the first place, that there are two kinds of arts entering into everything which we do.”
“The Younger Socrates: What are they?”
“Str: The one kind is the conditional or co-operative, the other the principal cause.”
“Y Soc: What do you mean?”
“Str: The arts which do not manufacture the actual thing, but which furnish the necessary tools for the manufacture, without which the several arts could not fulfil their appointed work, are co-operative; but those which make the things themselves are casual.”
“Y Soc: A very reasonable distinction.”
“Str: Thus the arts which make spindles, combs, and other instruments of the production of clothes, may be called co-operative, and those which treat and fabricate the things themselves, causal.”
“Y Soc: Very true.”
- Dialogues of Plato, Statesman, [281, 21]

We disagreed as to whether the Gold Rush girls were conditional or causal. It was the Eagles first road win of the season.

Panel: Corey Denis is from Rumblefish (moderator), Maureen Herman from Fuzz, Brian Dear from Eventful, Irv Remedios from Mozes, Ariel Hyatt from Cyber PR, John Luini from Virtual Venues.

Ms. Hyatt’s biggest obstacle in changing from traditional publicity to digital publicity has been educating the bands on what digital outlets are and how to best work with them. She stresses that publicity does not lead to sales, and that digital is not necessarily better than traditional publicity, just different.

Online promotion is good if it leads people to come out to the show. There are so many channels, and so the challenge is to figure out where your audience spends time. Go there.

Getting written up in Pitchfork and other big name blogs has become the publicists’ equivalent to getting in Spin or Rolling Stone. It’s the same outreach process, same relationship management, and if you’re doing it carefully, the same amount of time and effort.

Mr. Remedios brings up that working with the mobile phone channel is unique. The key points are that timeliness matters more, content has to be compelling, and content should include a call to action. (ed: those sound a lot like web copywriting pointers). In their opinion, promoting via mobile phones is a different mechanism and can work once you get the feel for it.

Eventful.com offers two main tools. One is a search engine for events. Part of that is rec’s and filters. The other side is demand driven. They’ve designed a widget to promote fan interaction and aggregate attention. Fans can use the widget to request that bands come to their town.

Mr. Luini makes a point that promotions should be about connecting bands with fans, and enabling them to get closer.

Ms. Hyatt suggests that bands follow lessons from web marketing experts and focus on building/leveraging email lists.

Mr. Dear suggests that the ultimate publicity tool for bands would be one that completely dis-intermediates the publicists. Panelists wince. Editor stops taking notes.

See also:
* SanFran MusicTech Summit Intro
* Artists, Copyrights, Technology
* Conversation with Claudio Prado
* Streaming: The Future of Radio
* The Paradise of Infinite Storage

Digital Media Wire announces Slicethepie.com taking in $2M in their third round of venture funding. Slicethepie is another site where fans prepay artists as a means to get closer to the person and/or creative process. Meanwhile, Mr. Van Buskirk looks at Slicethepie’s first album (The Alps’ Something I Might Regret) released under the new model.

Ms. Sobule didn’t sell shares in the record. She gave away premiums, pledge drive style. Slicethepie actually distributes ownership in the product.

Experiencing minor technical difficulties from upgrading WordPress. Stop.

Dear WordPress PR Minions and Blog Scraper Bots,

Thank you for your wonderful new release including the fabulous fix on xmlrpc.php. I’ve been using wordpress for some time and I can honestly say I’ve never enjoyed xmlrpc.php more.

Unfortunately, during the upgrade process, one of your scripts took the opportunity to revisit the careful formatting used in all of my previous posts. We’ve got a small problem.

This description might not be technically accurate – the problem looks as though the visual post editing engine is designed to replace some special characters with their visual counterparts, by default. As a result, my blockquotes are now all broken.

The database now serves all my previous “<blockquote>”s as “<blockquote>”s.

The < and > symbols have been replaced with their visual counterparts.

Presumably there are some cases where this character replacement during upgrade trick would be great. In my case it’s a real drag… I depend on the handy blockquote feature to puff up all my posts. The solution appears to be to go back through each post, enter code view mode, and replace all instances of < & >!

If you could please forward this message to a volunteer tech support person – whomever is tasked with making my free software fun and blockquote friendly – that would be convenient. I can be reached via the email.

Thanks for your help.

Warm regards,

Jeffrey Osborne

UPDATE: Forgot that I’d made a backup. Theoretically I should be able to import all my old posts with the proper html. Will try it sometime soon and report… Nope, giving up on importing the posts and going through each post manually. Fun… Not too much work. The only negatively affected posts were ones written since a certain date. I’m guessing that was the date of the previous upgrade to 2.3.

[tags]WordPress 2.3.3[/tags]

Some of the more innovative and free things you can do:

1.) Use goodsearch. Before you search, make a selection in the “who do you goodsearch for” field. Select Electronic Frontier Foundation. That creates a file on your computer that will remember your choice. From then on every goodsearch you make will raise funds for the EFF.

2.) Get married. Find a special (preferably single) friend and plan a wedding party. Register with the I Do Foundation. Convince all your family and friends to donate to EFF via the I Do Foundation. (I definitely don’t understand this one but the EFF people do so what the hell.) Alternately, it seems like you could skip the whole wedding concept and announce to your friends and family that it would make you happy if they donate to the EFF directly.

3.) Sell your crap on eBay and direct the proceeds to EFF with the help of MissionFish. You know you have too much crap. EFF is registered with MissionFish. This means you can select EFF to receive any percentage of the proceeds from your sale. This might make it more convenient for you to donate to EFF. Again, you might stick with Craigslist and donate directly to EFF, OR keep your crap and donate directly to EFF. Any one of those options seems viable.

4.) Blog about the EFF… ha! It won’t accomplish anything but you’re a blogger so you’re plenty used to that.

[tags]EFF, Goodsearch, I Do Foundation, MissionFish[/tags]

FLICKR: Wait! B-b-b-but, wait! What!?

YHOO: Hmm… Well no, actually we do refuse.

MSFT: Unfortunate.

MSFT: Then we fight! For the future!!

YHOO: (This could get ugly – you guys better go home)

SFGATE: MSFT is hinting at something.

SEATTLE-PI: YHOO appears modest, coy, desperate, isolated, etc.

YHOO: Hey, a new message in myspace.

LOEWS: Ballmer, you lack financial acumen.

FOREMSKI: YHOO, you lack ethical stature.

GATES: We’re too cool to haggle. Original offer stands.

MSFT: X-box Press Release 1… X-Box Press Release 2… X-Box Press Release 3…

GOOG: Huh. Weird. Yeah, so me and my buddies are sending robots to the moon.

Stay tuned!

Er, maybe not though, and I’m not taking an absolute position on this and honestly not involved enough in that space to know all the ins and outs. But I can see that blogging is still considered “out” by people who desperately want it to be in.

Case in point is this enormous and weighty discussion thread going on over at Harvard Business Review’s new want-to-be-a-blog-but-not-quite-ready site, HBRgreen.org. (h/t Shannon at Triple Pundit)

Have you ever seen a group of professionals invest so much time and energy into debating HBR content?

The HBR thread is perhaps of interest to anyone managing or planning for an academic journal. By now most people are aware of blogs though many hold deep misconceptions about who uses the internet and how. It’s also true that print journals deliver a loaded experience; it’s easy to conflate that experience with ideas about credibility, respectability and seriousness. There are merits in the print format and I don’t recommend anyone completely abandon that approach. I’m NOT suggesting a “wisdom of the crowds” play for academia in general. Not likely that.

Simply observing that everyone in academia agrees on the theoretical benefits of a healthy discourse, yet print journals (like some blogs) are notorious for leading readers into an unhealthy echo-chamber of ideas… The important difference being the size and dynamic nature of that chamber, as even a tiny blog community can generate greater diversity of informed perspective than an established and highly edited journal.

More importantly, making content available for some type of threaded discussion is a great way to engage and interact with a community of smart people. If I was designing a journal, I’d design it to engage the largest, most active, and best informed community possible.

PS: Who am I to pronounce the merits of blogs – I whom art too lazy to enable comments? I’m not an academic journal (one), trackbacks are enabled (two), and if you don’t know what trackbacks are, google is still your friend (three). Plus, I’ve got email, send me a note…

[tags]Academic Journals, Ideas, Blogs, Communication[/tags]

Update to a post from last month regarding RIAA’s legal actions. Two sites to be aware of:

* Electronic Frontier Foundation’s “EFF v. People”

* Ty Rogers and Ray Beckerman’s blawg “Recording Industry vs. The People”

Both sites offer a lot of information and many more helpful links.

Class action suit against the RIAA. According to the Wired Listening Post blog:

“RIAA defendant Tanya Anderson has filed the first file sharing class action suit against the RIAA, seeking payment for “significant damages caused by the Defendants” to everyone who has been sued by the organization to date.”

One one side – it’s easy and probably unreasonable to accept that every RIAA prosecution has been as misguided as some reports would lead us to believe.

On the other – it’s easy and probably undeniable to conclude that the RIAA has a much heavier PR presence than private individuals like Tanya Anderson. How many of these stories are going on outside of the few that get public attention?

Should be interesting to see how many other abusive RIAA cases come to light.
[tags]Tanya Anderson, RIAA[/tags]

I’ve been more or less following the net radio story recently. Last Friday, Xeni at BoingBoing reported a breakthrough in the negotiations. There’s been a lot of development over the past few days and I’m not going to attempt to summarize. I’m sure the sunday papers have done a fine job.

From my view it looks like Soundexchange lobbyists gambled that they could knock out net radio with one blow. They proposed a deal that would effectively buy off a chunk of the internet. Many thousands of members of the internet using public were unhappy about the proposed deal; they phoned and emailed their congressional representatives. “Oppose this deal” they said. Congress stepped in on behalf of public opinion. Soundexchange’s previous terms are off the table.

Evidence of pretty good collaboration between radio and net radio, newspapers and blogs, politicians and public opinion.

PS: If you want free indie rock go here.

[tags]Save Net Radio, Soundexchange[/tags]