The future of publishing

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Wired Cover

Wired Editor in Chief Chris Anderson has two great articles on how Wired is transforming its web site.

THEN: Bookmarks and habit drive traffic to the home page; site architecture and editorial hierarchy determines where readers goes next. Portals rule.

NOW: Search and blog links drive readers to individual stories; they leave as quickly as they come. “De-portalization” rules.

THEN: Media as Lecture: we create content, you read it.

NOW: Media as Conversation: a total blur between traditional journalism, blogging and user comment/contributions.

THEN: Readers read HTML in a standard web browser window. If you want to be really fancy, design a whole new Flash interface that people will have to learn to get to your content. Charge for “premium content”? Sure!

NOW: More and more people read via RSS, where content is divorced from context. Media is atomized and microchunked. Even if readers do come to your site, the expectation is that the presentation will be a mix of HTML, AJAX, Flash multimedia and embedded third-party apps. Screens range from high-resolution wide displays to handhelds. Whatever you do, don’t let your design interfere with web conventions–everything must be Google-crawlable and blogger permalinkable. Oh, and everything must be open and free.

THEN: We control the site. Editors are gatekeepers.

NOW: We share control with readers. Editors catalyze and curate conversations that happen as much “out there” as on our own site.

Read the two stories over at the long tail:
What would radical transparency mean for Wired? (Part 1)
What would radical transparency mean for Wired? (Part 2)

The future of publishing

iPods – now simply with “memory”

eirikso2 Comments

iPod nano ad

Just a quick update on the story about the not-so-important-typo in an ad for the iPod Nano. In their latest ad Lefdal simply state the amount of memory for all iPods. No harddrive or flash memory. Only memory. A good idea. After all, the average customer won’t care about the type of memory. They care about how many songs they’ll be able to store.

Here’s the update on the original story. And, I don’t know if they changed the text because of my insignificant rant…

iPods – now simply with “memory”

DRM is a stupid idea

eirikso6 Comments

DRM Defeating Kit for iTunes
My article on music and marketing sparked a little debate about digital rights management (DRM). I am in the opinion that DRM is in general a bad idea. It doesn’t work. It’s not user friendly. And the only people it serves are the owners of the DRM systems that can lock people into their particular playback devices.

Like Oyvind point out in the comments here it’s not the end of the world. It’s not global warming or bird flu. But it’s annoying and limiting for the development of good distribution platforms and user friendly systems on digital media.

And because there are people out there that’s way smarter than me I’ll point you to three resources that goes a bit more into detail about why DRM is a bad idea and why it hopefully will disappear:

Gerd Leonhard
The end of DRM is near

Yes, indeed, we are just about there: DRM is on its way out, and I needed to tell you about it, in this podcast. The Music Industry’s equivalent of the Berlin Wall is indeed coming down…. soon.

Cory Doctorow
DRM doesn’t work, it’s bad for society, business and the artists

It used to be illegal to plug anything that didn’t come from AT&T into your phone-jack. They claimed that this was for the safety of the network, but really it was about propping up this little penny-ante racket that AT&T had in charging you a rental fee for your phone until you’d paid for it a thousand times over.

When that ban was struck down, it created the market for third-party phone equipment, from talking novelty phones to answering machines to cordless handsets to headsets — billions of dollars of economic activity that had been supressed by the closed interface. Note that AT&T was one of the big beneficiaries of this: they also got into the business of making phone-kit.

DRM is the software equivalent of these closed hardware interfaces.

A Copyfighter’s Musings
Microsoft’s Zune Won’t Play Protected Windows Media

May this be a lesson to those who mistakenly laud certain DRM as “open” and offering customers “freedom of choice” simply because it is widely-licensed. With DRM under the DMCA, nothing truly plays for sure, regardless of whether you’re purchasing from Apple, Microsoft, or anyone else.

DRM is a stupid idea

Preview removed …and a recommended plugin

eirikso2 Comments

My experiment with Snap Preview lasted for four days. I agree with the comments back on the original post. This is functionallity that belongs to the browser. And on recommendation from Onno I have installed Cooliris. A plugin for Firefox, Safari and Explorer that I now can recommend as well. It gives you a quick preview for links in a popup window. If you like what you see you can quickly transfer that page to a new tab.

You get a small blue square besides the links. When you mouse over the square a popup will show the page. I have made a quick screen recording to show how it works.

Link to video.

The screen recording was made with the free and open source tool called CamStudio. Currently windows only, but if you’re on Mac or Linux you can find different tools for screen recording in this list in Wikipedia.

Preview removed …and a recommended plugin

How to market music on the internet

eirikso28 Comments

bnl
According to the big record labels this internet thing is close to the worst thing that has ever happened. They do what they can to work against the possibilities and enormous potential this fantastic distribution and communication platform has to offer.

Let’s do a wild hypothesis and assume that people will actually come to your concerts, buy your t-shirts, use your music commercially and actually pay for your tracks as long as you make the music available and tap into the power of the internet. What are your options?

Market yourself
Make a profile on MySpace. Publish your videos on YouTube. Make a channel in Democracy Player. Be present on Last.fm and in Pandora. A lot of people use these sites to discover new music.

If you make quality music you could end up on BoingBoing like Sophe Lux. If you do cool stuff like Bare Naked Ladies you could end up on digg several times, on BoingBoing, Slashdot and in general – all over the place.

Join the conversation
Start a blog. Follow the blogsphere. Be active on the music forums.

Make yourself available
Millions of idiots buy music on iTunes music store and MSN music. Files that will only play on certain players and with heavy restrictions on use. Still, it’s a good idea to be there because of those millions of idiots… Even better, be available on eMusic and any other stores that sell DRM free music. If your music gets popular it will be available out there without DRM anyway.

Give your fans control
Let fans take pictures on your concerts. Let them record on their phones and cameras. Let them share their works. Make tags on Flickr and YouTube and Del.icio.us so people can find you. Let them remix and have fun with your music. Let them help you with your next album. Use creative commons to avoid commercial exploitation.

Do like BNL
Yes, simply do like the already mentioned Bare Naked Ladies. BoingBoing have a good roundup of all the cool stuff BNL do here. You also find them on Flickr and YouTube through the tag “bnl”.

How to market music on the internet

Recommended reading

eirikso2 Comments

People keeps asking, so here they are. Books to read if you want to update yourself on new media:

The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More Naked Conversations: How Blogs are Changing the Way Businesses Talk with Customers Small Is the New Big: and 183 Other Riffs, Rants, and Remarkable Business Ideas

I’ve read all three and can really recommend them. Then, Lasse Klein and a couple of my readers have recommended this one: “Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means”

Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom

…so I guess that will be in my next shipment from Amazon…

Update:
From the comments: Espen points me to “The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom“. Interesting content and interesting project. A creative commons licensed book available in many different versions.

Disclaimer:
The links to Amazon are sponsored. If you use them and buy some of the books you will support eirikso.com with some tiny percentage of Amazon’s profit. Yippee. If you don’t like that idea and want Amazon to keep the complete profit then you can simply search for the books directly over at Amazon.com. Just wanted you to know.

Recommended reading