Quiet shopping days July 27, 2007
Posted by Andy Roberts in : London , add a comment 
On my way back from Open Coffee London yesterday I decided on impluse to drop in on the Apple Store in Regent Street.
Applestore London picture by ::dani::
I’ve never seen the place so quiet before. There were no queues at all at the checkouts, plenty of spare demonstration setups on which visitors can quickly check their email, and several staff hanging around trying to find somebody to help.
Maybe it’s the weather, maybe it’s the time of year. Probably not the time of day - a weekday early lunchtime. But it doesn’t seem to be a time when many people are thinking about upgrading their Macs, iPods or buying a first one. Could be the rumours that there are a whole load of new products about to be announced.
How about offering a nice sale discount to shift all the current stuff first?
eMint evening on legal issues for online communities July 22, 2007
Posted by Andy Roberts in : Community, online facilitation, London , 1 comment so farI’m really glad that David Wilcox blogged the emint seminar on legal issues facing online communities which we attended over a week ago:
Designing for Civil Society: On stealing virtual sex beds, and the risks in Facebook groups
An evening of presentations and discussion on Internet law may not sound gripping, but I’m really glad I went along the other day to an event organised by Lizzie Jackson of e-mint, and lawyers K&L Gates.
The question on my mind during most of the evening was mostly to do with how we can keep the legal questions, and more often just the fear of them, from becoming an obstacle to the free exchange of information and opinion on the internet. It was heartening to hear the legal experts impart that the technology is advancing way too fast for the legislative processes to stand any chance of catching up with it.
Londoners under surveillance July 19, 2007
Posted by Andy Roberts in : London , add a comment 
Police are to be given live access to London’s congestion charge cameras - allowing them to track all vehicles entering and leaving the zone.
Anti-terror officers will be exempted from parts of the Data Protection Act to allow them to see the date, time and location of vehicles in real time.
They previously had to apply for access on a case-by-case basis.
Blog Friends app on Facebook July 18, 2007
Posted by Andy Roberts in : theory, facebook, blogs and community, web2.0 , 2comments
Introducing ‘Blog Friends’, a new application on Facebook which fills an apparently simple yet imporant niche. This is what it does:
- Track blog posts by your Facebook friends—on topics that interest you
- Showcase those posts on your Facebook profile
- Watch your friends grow your blog readership for you in return
It’s just been launched as a public Beta by Luke Razzell, who has been blogging on the topic of “Identity” for several years now, so we can expect the theoretical underpinning of the application design to be a sound one. It certainly seems to have all the makings of a succesfull Facebook app, including the capacity to spread virally, and appealing to the needs of bloggers to attempt to reach wider audiences. Every thing has been well thought out including the name, logo, taglines and this graphic:
And this is what it looked like from inside Facebook over the weekend:
Notice the RSS icons - this is one application which allows you to take your data outside of Facebook instead of just sucking things in. So it drives a small hole into the ‘walled garden’ criticism of the fashionable Facebook fad.
Outside in my feedreader I’m suddenly discovering a number of new blogs and posters, within my specified areas of interest, all thanks to my blog friends. And no, I don’t have any financial or other stake in the enterprise, I simply volunteered to alpha test out of of interest and because I’ve known Luke as a blogger for a long time. The fact that the whole application was developed from specification to working Beta in around three weeks has staggering implications for the future of web apps and Facebook.
Buy a football club for £35 July 17, 2007
Posted by Andy Roberts in : ebbsfleet, crowdsource, UK , 6comments
Crowdsourcing does fantasy football
- with a real club.
Own the club,
pick the teamIT’S NOT A GAME
This is going to be interesting. There are almost enough people registered already, so if you want to own part of an English league football club you’d better hurry. The organised crowd of 50,000 fans will then seek to buy a club and run it, through some kind of mass democratic ownership scheme. No manager, no big shareholders, no chairman of the board. Just armchair decision making. The wisdom (or folly) of crowds gets a chance to prove itself in a competitive situation against the conventional setup of an experienced management having to deal with the vested interests. Exciting times!
50,000 MyFootballClub members are about to bid for an English football club. They will make history together, voting on team selection and on which players to buy and sell.
Pajamanation Venezuela on TV July 16, 2007
Posted by Andy Roberts in : Pajamanation , add a commentOn behalf of PajamaNati0n VE, just over two hours ago, Ricardo Del Rio was on Venezuela morning TV talking about the pajamanation lifestyle.
Since he got home the phone hasn’t stopped ringing with over 50 new people in Venezuela registering on the site already.
Without shoes….
Talking about Entrepreneurship 2.0 on TV
More at
Trabajando en Pijamas Libre y Feliz
Interfacing blogs and Facebook July 16, 2007
Posted by Andy Roberts in : facebook, blogs and community , 2commentsThe interface between blogs and Facebook is throwing up interesting dilemmas. There are various ways to import blog posts, so that they show up on a user profile, application or minifeed within Facebook. But there is no RSS back out again. So whilst it may be desirable to have blogs exposed within FB where the critical mass of presences may lead to new readers and friends, the overall osmotic pressure is ultimately an inward one, slowly pulling more and more of the activity in behind the walled garden. That’s something Linda worries about too.
For example, my recent post on this topic gained a useful comment from an old friend who is now on Facebook as well. But his comment was posted right there, where he read the post. Inside the wall. So what do I do?
I’ve replied in situ and I’m tempted to reproduce the comment here. At this stage it would have to be without identifying the author, but that’s something I’m not happy about. So I’ll wait for consent or clarification. Instinctively I feel that any technology which mitigates towards the unconscious splitting of conversations is probably not desirable, so I’ll also look again at the different methods for importing feeds into Facebook and choose carefully.
Music business models for internet artists July 15, 2007
Posted by Andy Roberts in : social objects, Flickr, Long Tail, Music , add a comment
Samantha Murphy asks on Facebook MyQuestions how can a musician earn a living in the digital age, in conjunction with having just decided that “Free is the way to go” and making all the tracks on her album available for free download.
I’m trying to synthesise this situation facing musical artists with the ideas from Jyri Engestrom back in June. He noticed a change in successful website businesses towards charging the publishers, not the spectators. Photos on Flickr for example, are consumed free of charge by a readership far wider than the photographers. The photographers themselves pay a small premium in order to be allowed to upload a larger number of pictures and organise them. Back to music, last.fm currently charges consumers for full access to their own personalised radio station but in some sense they are also publishing their playlists. The movement there is towards encouraging artists and labels to provide free downloads and then perhaps pay to gain higher exposure on the system. Applied to the digital music industry then, the model would appear to be to “charge the uploaders, not the downloaders”.
Vanity publishing
So life would appear to be tough for the artists. Perhaps there is a surfeit of aspiring musicians and it is audience attention which is in short supply? All a bit like the vanity publishing industry for amateur novel writers. Or is it?
Free Prince album
By coincidence, news has just broken that the artist now known again as Prince has struck a deal whereby his new album is given away with a newspaper. This is said to be an arrangement more lucrative than his previous album sold conventionally through the record shops. That doesn’t seem very repeatable, but it’s seen by the music publishing industry as a betrayal. They managed to convince most celebrity artists that defending intellectual property rights is the only way to ensure they can get paid for being creative. In truth, it’s the only way to ensure the intermediates get a disproportionate slice of it, and that is what’s being lamented.
Singer songwriter
Nearly all musical artists who work solo call themselves singer-songwriters these days, and nearly all bands perform their own material. This is probably a distortion caused by the writers royalties being a major factor when choosing material to perform. Probably there are a lot of great singers, many potential songwriters and a few who are great singer songwriters. There could be opportunities for musicians who have mastered the art of digital studio recording to offer to turn songwriters’ material into published tracks for them. Alternatively singers may commission writers to provide materal especially for their performance style. The opportunities for cross covers, remote collaboration, duets and derivative mixes are bursting out of the old model, and who knows where it may lead in the long tail of diverse taste and the needs of so many people to find an outlet for their creativity.
Quote
A spokesman for the singer told The Mail on Sunday: “Prince’s only aim is to get music direct to those who want to hear it.
“Prince feels that charts are just music industry constructions and have little or no relevance to fans or even artists today.”
Facebook MySpace and Linkedin friends July 14, 2007
Posted by Andy Roberts in : facebook, Flickr, Music, blogs and community, tools , 6comments
Escape from Cubicle Nation asks Are there any rules for social/business networking? We’re talking about Facebook, MySpace and Linkedin here.
Unless you have been hiding under a rock, as a person who deals with the business of networking on the internet, you are aware that Linkedin, Facebook and MySpace are important places to see and be seen. If you are growing a business and want exposure and connection with your target audience, it is critical to explore these online communities.
The question is, how in the world do you know how or where to be seen, and most importantly, with whom?
It’s a good question, and I would add Twitter, MyBlogLog and Flickr to the conundrum. But don’t expect any finished answers, because this is a question you have to keep asking yourself from time to time for each network you are in. I’m just going to list some practices which I’ve adopted or observed for each.
Flickr
This is the only one which allows for some granularity of the relationship, on three levels. Family, Friends and Contacts. There’s also a strong link to my city, London, in the way I use it so my friends tend to be people I’ve met in person, or might do. Contacts are like bookmarks to people’s photostreams I want to keep track of.
MySpace
I have a musician’s MySpace so that’s slightly different, but not much. MySpace can turn into a pointless game, and I lost interest after a while. Initially I collected a bunch of links to people, mainly from the past, who influenced my own music. So my Top friends list was like an indication of taste. When new friend requests came in, (mostly from other musicians who are playing the game of “add, add, add”) I would check them out and be a bit discerning. There are some important connections to be made in Myspace, but eventually they get swamped by many extremely loose ties. If you stop adding, the interest in your profile dies. So now you can choose to block add requests from musicians, which shows how silly it has all become as a means of reaching a potential audience.
There are two types of LinkedIn users. Normal sensible people, and “power users”. These are essentially spammers who will link in with anybody in order to leverage their extended network for marketing purposes. They break the terms and conditions by advertising their email address as part of the name field, and thus allow total strangers to become their trusted business contacts.
LinkedIn is great for keeping an online CV, access to contact details and for recruitment. Link to real friends, business colleagues and important contacts. After that, there’s not much to do. With the new Answers function you can get useful suggestions or build a reputation by answering others.
MyBlogLog
MyBlogLog has crept up on me and I’m starting to find it interesting. When a new face appears in my sidebar widget I usually check. They have a function whereby if you visit another members blog a few times you get automatically added to their circle. So I think the general idea is to be quite free with your adds on this one, and it may help slowly to build readership, by seeding clusters of bloggers with common interests.
I’m getting twitter spam follower notifications already so activating the “Turn all your followers into friends” button seems like a really bad idea.
I saved the hot one for last.
Facebook has a tradition of using real names and reflecting real life friendships from its origins in the colleges. This is now changing a bit, with the wide open membership and platform but it shouldn’t end up like mySpace. Within Facebook there are the new applications, and some of these are linked with external apps which have their own social networking aspects. It’s not yet clear how all of this is going to settle out.
General Reflection
My approach seems to be generally a cautious one, attempting to keep a sense of real value in the connections I make. In some ways I may be missing opportunities to enlarge the circle, and I’m sure I should be doing more to nurture the connections which are already in place. Having a transparent online identity which is prolific and probably important to my longer term strategy engenders a certain reluctance to engage in aggressively direct marketing activities. I’m also having some thoughts about the bidirectional nature of add friend requests.
I’ll come back to this topic again, but now throw the question out to you. What are your own rules for adding friends in the different online networks and how do you see the general territory developing?
Broadband demographics evident at Glastonbury Festival July 13, 2007
Posted by Andy Roberts in : best broadband deals, Music, UK , 1 comment so far
Michael Eavis , the dairy farmer who runs Glastonbury music festival, blames the policy of selling all tickets online for the ageing of his audience this year.
Here’s the Metro version of the news
Glastonbury ‘too middle-aged’
This year’s Glasto turned into a mud bath
Missed out on a Glasto ticket this year? Well, blame the broadband revolution … and your mum and dad.
Well-heeled thirty and fortysomethings used their super-fast Internet connections to beat teenagers to tickets for the festival this year.
Selling tickets online meant the three day festival – traditionally the preserve of a younger crowd seeking parties and musical debauchery – became ‘too middle- aged’ and even respectable, claimed event organiser Michael Eavis.
He said the lucky few who snapped up this year’s 137,500 tickets in just 1hr 45min were likely to be older people, with the money for fast Internet connections, while the number of 16 to 18-yearolds had fallen.
A silly story really, but informative concerning perceived and actual demographics of internet access and broadband penetration.
The BBC Radio 4 Today Programme presenter though that it was extraordinary to suggest that teenagers couldn’t access the internet, but at what time of day did the tickets go on sale?
is an online professional who initiated DARnet 
