Bryant Urstadt, in MIT Technology Review, challenges the conventional wisdom about Social Networking and profit.
Tag Archives: economy
“When we’re poor… our economic worldview is shaped by deprivation”
Boston.com: The sting of poverty: The more of a painful or undesirable thing one has (i.e. the poorer one is) the less likely one is to do anything about any one problem. Poverty is less a matter of having few goods than having lots of problems.
NYTimes: Paul Krugman: Poverty is Poison:To be poor in America today, even more than in the past, is to be an outcast in your own country. And that, the neuroscientists tell us, is what poisons a child’s brain.
Philly.com: The new mandate: First, find them a home: Deborah Harmon, 43 and mentally ill, was released from jail for panhandling, and again faced living on the streets or in a shelter. Runell McKnight, 25, had no place to go with her two young children after she broke up with the man she was living with. Today, both women have apartments of their own, with each a beneficiary of programs that aggressively promote the notion that, above all, the homeless need homes.
The Gospel of Consumption: “Nothing,” he claimed, “breeds radicalism more than unhappiness unless it is leisure.”
Elizabeth Warren interview at UC Berkley: It is partly about politics. If you don’t email your congresswoman or your congressman and your senator, then you are part of the problem today. You’ve got to tell them that this is an issue that matters to you, that this really, truly matters.
MSM Blog Networks Aren’t All That Bad
I hate the term “MSM” (Mainstream Media) that we bloggers use to describe older media and news organizations, but sometimes you need to acquiesce.
Lots of folks thought that members of traditional media couldn’t ‘do blogging’ for various reasons. They were wrong. Take a look around and you will find some of the best blogs are being produced in places once thought unlikely.
Wired Magazine’s Wired Blogs have some of the most interesting technology/geek focused blogs you could subscribe to.
For politics there are those hosted at The Atlantic.
And, at least in Philly, local newspapers have fully embraced them at Philly.com (The Inquirer and Daily News), philadelphia weekly, and Philadelphia City Paper.
Shoot, even local TV News shows have gotten in the act at NBC 10 and Fox 29.
From The Donnas to Rick Rubin
I wish more in the newspaper industry would pay attention to their canary in the coal mine – the music industry.
Rolling Stone: “The Record Industry’s Decline”:
…Overall CD sales have plummeted sixteen percent for the year so far — and that’s after seven years of near-constant erosion. In the face of widespread piracy, consumers’ growing preference for low-profit-margin digital singles over albums, and other woes, the record business has plunged into a historic decline.
The major labels are struggling to reinvent their business models, even as some wonder whether it’s too late. “The record business is over,” says music attorney Peter Paterno, who represents Metallica and Dr. Dre. “The labels have wonderful assets — they just can’t make any money off them.” One senior music-industry source who requested anonymity went further: “Here we have a business that’s dying. There won’t be any major labels pretty soon.”
…More record executives now seem to understand that their problems are structural: The Internet appears to be the most consequential technological shift for the business of selling music since the 1920s, when phonograph records replaced sheet music as the industry’s profit center. “We have to collectively understand that times have changed,” says Lyor Cohen, CEO of Warner Music Group USA. In June, Warner announced a deal with the Web site Lala.com that will allow consumers to stream much of its catalog for free, in hopes that they will then pay for downloads. It’s the latest of recent major-label moves that would have been unthinkable a few years back…
Newsome.Org: “The Lost Rituals of Music”:
I suspect Fred misses the good old days when listening to music was the thing, itself. As opposed to something you do while you’re doing something else. These days everything is compressed. Time. Music. Fun. Back in the day, we’d put Frampton Comes Alive on the turntable, sit back and just enjoy the sound. Same with the Allman’s At Fillmore East, and the best one of all- Europe ’72. We’d read the album covers and the liner notes. We never felt hurried, like we should be doing something else.
Our record collections were tangible. We could browse through them like books. The joy of picking out a record, taking it out of the sleeve and putting it on the turntable was a ritual to our passion.
And a huge kick in the head is the news that Rick Rubin is now a co-President at Columbia Records.
NYTimes: “The Music Man”:
“That’s the magic of the business,” he said. “It’s all doom and gloom, but then you go to a Gossip show or hear Neil in the studio and you remember that too many people make and love music for it to ever die. It will never be over. The music will outlast us all.”
Rick Rubin has been a force in music that has influenced me for the last twenty years. He’s now producing Metallica’s latest and hopefully will return them to greatness. Can any one ‘save’ the music industry? No. But it can be re-invented. And Rubin can play a major role.
As Dave Rogers puts it for Paul Potts, that opera singer that Rubin was gushing about, “the love of the art preceded the opportunity to exploit it, commercially” – that’s something Rubin has always understood. His pursuit of Hip-Hop, Metal, or Roots Rock (the Black Crowes) acts before they were mainstream always made him stand out. His search for the pure soul of an artist, whether it be Neil Diamond or Johnny Cash, exemplifies it.
Rick Rubin being Co-President of Columbia does mark me as old however. He and the music he’s promoted, are no longer on the fringes of the mainstream, and now he’s part of the machine.
Lets hope it gets interesting.
Now on to other matters…
tonypierce.com: “do you know why i know life isnt fair”:
cuz even the donnas had to form their own label. dropped by atlantic after “fall behind me” only made a few suits rich, the donnas are doing their own thing now, shunning their donna c, donna s., schtict and now using their real names, the donnas rocked the world famous viper room last night for their album release party of Bitchin’, which drops today.
Bottom line: The Donnas rock.
Play Like A Girl: “Clean sweeping arpeggios for guitar”:
Oh dear. Two weeks is nowhere near enough time to master a challenging new technique. Our fast-paced culture of instant gratification leads many people to expect to totally kick ass at new skills within an extremely short time. If they can’t manage, they think they either don’t have the “talent” for it or that they must be doing something horribly wrong.
Some skills just take time to develop. And beware: there are plenty of guitarists out there who will lie about grossly underestimate the amount of time and effort they need to master a given technique, just so they will appear more “talented.” This is total bovine excrement. So cut yourself some slack, realize that any skill takes time to develop, and don’t compare your own progress with other people’s.
From my favorite musician’s blog.
Yahoo! and Google Move to Squeeze Newspapers Further
Yahoo! has relaunched it’s local search service. It better surfaces community driven participation and feels far more like a destination than before.
Screenwerk: Yahoo! Refreshes, Redesigns Local.
They still haven’t gone as far as I expect them to one day do – integrate Flickr, del.icio.us, and Groups, and Maps into a cohesive whole, but the potential is there.
On the other side is Google, which recently launched its Business Referral Representative program.
Google will now pay you as an independent contractor to collect information on local businesses, telling them about Ad Words, and submitting them to Google Maps. You can read more about it from here and a recent SearchEngineWatch article.
The Sad Irony of Layoffs at the Inquirer and Daily News
Last week a prime example of the utility and the need, for news organizations like those in our newspapers, played out in the pages of the Philadelphia Inquirer as it reported on mismanagement in Philadelphia’s Department of Human Services.
Mismanagement that has led to up to five children deaths in 2006.
In the report’s wake, two officials have been ousted and workers are left up in arms and in disarray, organizing a huge protest last Friday.
Contract negotiations are taking place at the Inquirer and Daily News, in the midst of huge shifts in the newspaper marketplace. Shifts that have been taking place for sometime now, shifts that force the issue – newspaper companies must change their business models or die.
Knight Ridder papers responded to changing marketplace, the past six years, with ever shrinking budgets, ever tightening belts, and consolidation of resources and empowerment in the hands of the few. The culmination of which was the fire sale that took place over the past year.
In Philadelphia a sense of optimism sprung as it was a group of local business leaders that purchased the papers. They talked of investment, and a recognition that further cuts were almost impossible to make.
So you gotta give the Daily News’s Will Bunch a pass for the bleak tone in his latest piece on the situation at the papers and the industry at large. I’m reflecting his irony here. This post being an echo of his in a sense.
How could he not feel that way with the memo him and other Philadelphia Media Holdings employees received Friday? A memo that sounded, I bet to his ears, all too familiar.
While saving the paper isn’t about saving jobs – it is about investment. Bold bets. A look towards the future. That’s hard to do with less and less resources, with folks busy just trying to keep up.
There is massive opportunity for the papers to reinvent their business models. And there are folks at the papers with the knowledge and wherewithal to do it (read all of Will’s post). But time is running out.
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More at PJNet by Leonard Witt.
Norgs Stories for October 10th
Whadda week!
- Google acquires YouTube for $1.65 billion in stock and everyone’s hearts are a flutter. There’s been much grousing about what this means (see Memeorandum), but like damn near always, I find what’s missing is a historical perspective. Google acquired large particiaptory media companies in the past. Think Blogger. Think DejaNews. This fits what has always been in the company’s DNA. A recognition that the web is social software. The frightening thing is that companies are liable to take the wrong lessons from this. Time for everyone to take a deep breath. For some interesting thoughts see Scott Karp, Scott Rosenberg, Niall Kennedy, Susan Mernit, lostremote, Jeff Jarvis, and Don Dodge.
- ONA sounded like it was a success this year, where real progress was made and minds opened.
Jeff Jarvis called it “The death of Eeyore”, sharing the optimism and passion he noticed at the conference.
But it had to happen. Someone had to go back to that tired fiction,that tired lie – that of a ‘fight’ between blogging and journalism. This time it came from a blogger – Mike Arrington, of Techcrunch – who talks about it, from his point of view on his blog.
It’s clear that from Jeff’s perspective, and Staci’s at paidContent,Arrington turned it into a polarized circus, and helped make bloggers look bad.
Mike Arrington doesn’t speak for the rest of us folks. Take note of Staci’s and Jeff’s reactions. We gotta continue to build bridges of understanding – not walls.
Amy Webb was there and thought that papers might be looking to hard at video as a savior.
- Speaking of building bridges of understanding – Doc Searls has a set of ten tips for newspapers, that sound very much in line with what we’ve been discussing here. It’s a good read, even if you find yourself nodding in agreement the whole time.
- Jay Rosen’s Q & A at Slashdot is a real must read. He answers, in depth,questions about NewAssignment.net, Citizen Journalism and the news industry.
- Rebecca Blood, talking about product customer service, and a concrete example with United Airlines, explains how Social Media Works.
- A long piece, that I have yet to read, but which looks to have much to chew on, is Alice Goldman’s paper (of the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law) Community Node-Based User Governance: Applying Craigslist’s Techniques to Decentralized Internet Governance.
Hey – what’s a Norg? And there was an unconference you say? Uhuh. And an ongoing conversation. We need to get our site rolling.
What is success?
Every time I’ve been interviewed about Philly Future, inevitably the question comes, “what is your business model?”. This is where I pause, mention the site currently has none, and that one day I expect it will emerge. I hypothesize on a few ideas, but lay down we’ll only go with one if it benefits the community. The bottom line is I have no concrete idea what that model is yet.
Admitting you don’t know something is sign of weakness in some circles. I can tell in these interview situations, I’ve made myself and Philly Future look bad. Since Philly Future, is not a big, well known, “grassroots” (with millions of investment dollars) service, this makes it harder to get taken seriously by some. I’m blessed to have it associated with a terrific team which doesn’t think so short sighted, and with a growing community that is pushing the boundaries of what it can do.
I’ve always felt admitting I don’t know something has always been a source of strength. An opportunity so that I can learn and grow.
One thing about success I’ve recently come to peace with is that cash alone can’t define it. I recently mucked up a generous offer, with a team I respect and want to help, because I wouldn’t walk away from Philly Future, was already quite happy (and challenged, I have much to learn) where I am, and didn’t want to sacrifice the already meager time I have with my family.
Past a certain point, past the struggles of poverty, once you get to a place where you can realistically dream of where you want to go or experience in life, cash, and the struggles to find it, can drag you down and will distract you from what’s really important.
Shelley Powers, in a post about BlogHer, says:
I won’t write on BlogHer again. No truly, this time I won’t. I would ask that the company remove the tagline “Where the Women are”, because it really isn’t all that true anymore. Is it? Still, if they don’t, such is life.
I also wish, and I mean it, much success for the organization. I have no illusions that I will change anyone’s viewpoint with this writing. Perhaps the emphasis on women’s purchasing power can, this time, be used as a weapon for social change. In this, I hope they succeed.
I’m going a different path, though. One that doesn’t measure success based on ads, links, and revenue. And I’m not going to look back.
Wish more thought that way in the world. But everyone is selling something aren’t they? It’s human nature. Shoot, Shelley is selling something to us in her post. A set of ideas and ideals. Take them or leave them.
Success, for many, seems to be about fame, fortune, power, and inclusion in some exclusive group. Is it human nature that we subconsciously exercise the 48 Laws of Power and use them on a daily basis? A question to ask yourself is what is your effective truth?
It’s not success when we let these drivers define success for us. It’s something all together different.
How to make money on the web
According to the New York Times lots of media companies are investing in the web, looking for a business model.
I have a simple question – when folks wonder ‘how do we make money at this?’, why do we instinctively forget the models that have come before that already do?
Amazon.com. Yahoo!, eBay, Craigslist, Google, Salon (I believe in the black).
What is similar about their business models? Do they recognize some essential nature of the web? Any other good examples?
And when we talk about new models for news gathering versus the old, and worry about how in-depth journalism will get financed, is there something related here?
Digital music enjoys a dream week
The web as the killer of the music industry? Even as the medium changes – the music lives on: Digital music enjoys a dream week – Yahoo! News:
There was so much legitimate downloading in the final week of 2005 that it recalled the impossible tallies research firms used in the late 1990s to dazzle venture capitalists and scare the daylights out of major-label executives.
In the seven-day stretch between Christmas and the new year, millions of consumers armed with new MP3 players (primarily iPods) and stacks of gift cards gobbled up almost 20 million tracks from iTunes and other download retailers, Nielsen SoundScan reports.
In the process, consumers shattered the tracking firm’s one-week record for download sales.
A look inside the numbers shows just how unprecedented a week it was for the download business:
– Before the week ending January 1, 2006, the record for the most downloads sold in seven days was 9.5 million tracks — set just one week earlier.
– Sales of 20 million songs were almost three times the amount of digital tracks sold in the same seven-day span a year ago.
– Fifteen songs on the current Hot Digital Songs chart surpassed the one-week record for sales of a single track.
– Rap group D4L’s “Laffy Taffy” took the top spot with 175,000 tracks sold, more than doubling the mark of 80,500 downloads Kanye West’s “Gold Digger” set the week of September 17.
– Each of the top 11 titles on the Hot Digital Songs chart sold more than 100,000 downloads.
For the year, the digital track sales tally reached 352 million — a 147% increase over 2004’s total of 142.6 million.
In comparison to the volume of music that is downloaded through peer-to-peer networks, those numbers may not seem like much. P2P monitoring service Big Champagne estimates that at least 250 million tracks are downloaded worldwide each week from file-swapping services.
But a dramatic rise in the tide of authorized download sales in recent weeks suggests that changes may be afoot in the consumer’s relationship to digital music.