What is on TV tonight February 28, 2007
Posted by Andy Roberts in : Long Tail, UK , add a commentHow many times do you ask yourself - Is there anything on the telly? And no, the answer isn’t “a penguin”
Frankie Roberto has launched a “micro service” called “On TV tonight” which isn’t another listings site, it’s a highly individual review of one or two programmes - or none - which are on TV tonight, delivered by RSS at 4.00am each morning. Obviously it’s aimed at the UK only and you may be wondering “why should I take any notice of what this Roberto person thinks is worth watching?”
So all I can say is to try it. Don’t spend hardly any time on it, just subscribe to the RSS and let the daily post pop up in your reader along with everything else. Then after a week or two, see if it might just have been useful on occasion.
frankie roberto blog - Introducing… ‘on TV tonight’
On ‘Micropublishing’:
Another reason I’ve done this is as an experiment into a concept I’ve been thinking about which I’ve called ‘micropublishing’. The idea is to focus on publishing concentrated amounts of highly relevant content which fills a specific need of a time-poor audience. By being rich but small, the content can be aggregated and transferred across platforms to be consumed in any way that’s useful.
You may also be interrested in the page on Microformats.
Frankie himself told me :
I built a really lightweight website over the holidays, which I’m asking for feedback on. It’s basically a low-maintenance blog where I write short comments about what I think is worth watching on tv each night. If nothing’s on it will just say “nothing on tv tonight”. I can queue up entries in advance, and then it’s published each morning via RSS and on the site. My personal aim was to a) see if I can write valuable, well-written content on a regular basis and b) produce another small Ruby on Rails website.
First Believer January 21, 2007
Posted by Andy Roberts in : Long Tail, Music , 6commentsWell what a breakthrough, my first believer and it’s not even my mum or my girlfriend! Many thanks to Graeme Mair - fuzzytnth who went on my Sellaband space and bought three shares. Who would have thought it.
I’ve also been promoting my new virtual record label on last.fm and that’s starting to propagate, although mySpace is probably the easiest to grow. The main thing is that there are some people out there who are enthusiastic enough about my new song Gernika and maybe after one has broken the ice it will be easier for the second and third believer etc, who knows.
Sellaband discussion September 26, 2006
Posted by Andy Roberts in : Long Tail , comments closedIn the comments on my recent blog post about Sellaband, (see below) some criticisms from Mike and a response from Johan Vosmeijer, Managing Director of the startup.
SellaBand September 23, 2006
Posted by Andy Roberts in : Long Tail, Music , 7commentsI really like the “long tail” business plan of this new unsigned musicians site.
The idea is that if you are a songwriter or a band, you upload a few demo mp3s and then try to get lots of people to sponsor the recording of an album. ‘Believers’ can buy stakes of $10 each which entitle them to a small slice of the ad revenue from the eventual professionally recorded music, which is provided free for download. The Artists get a stake as well, of course, and the website retains a percentage for themselves. That’s clever.
I heard about it on BBC world service radio in the middle of the night, (I had been kept awake by the excrutiating symptoms of Tomato Flu) and the spokesman from the website sounded sufficiently clued in and modest with it. They don’t expect anybody to raise the full $50,000 anytime this year, but they’ve been really pleased with the amount of trust which fans of unsigned bands have shown already. What they are providing is a mechanism which can be used as a roadmap for writing, financing and producing an album, and one which builds a really good relationship with a loyal fanbase at the same time, which can then be used as a springboard to greater things.
My only reservations are that you have to sign over forever, a proportion of the royalties for the songs which are recorded, so you might not want to put all of your best songs on the first album and then be left with ’second album syndrome’ for the real deal.
For research purposes, I created my own profile on the site here:
http://www.sellaband.com/andyroberts/ (It’s not often I get to beat all the other Andy Robertses to a user name)
So is there anybody out there who wants to ‘believe’ to the extent of $50,000?
No? Ok, it’ll have to be $10 each then.
Geek Dinner July 7, 2006
Posted by Andy Roberts in : Long Tail, London , 2commentsTonight at the Bottlescrue near St Pauls (Holborn Viaduct), London Geek Dinner.
Some American geezer tell us all last year’s news, so a large attendance is expected.
I’m contemplating whether I feel like it - anyone else thinking of going along?
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