Reid Dossinger: Archive

Add any site to your Google Buzz feed

I was looking around for a way to do like those folks at Mashable did and create a Google profile page for The Org so that folks could follow us in Buzz. I wanted to attach our Wordpress site (which, by the way, is NOT a blog if anyone asks) so that it would update automatically, so I added it to the list of links on the profile. But when I clicked on “connected sites” in Buzz, the Wordpress site was, unsurprisingly, not in the list.

After scouring the internet for clear instructions on how to add a Wordpress site to a Google profile so that it would feed into Buzz automatically, I finally came across these instructions. While they were useful, they were not the most clearly written instructions in the world, so I thought I’d simplify a little:

Add your site to your Google Profile (Edit Profile > Links)
Add in the following line of code to the <head> section of your website, replacing the link with the link to your public profile page: <link href=”http://www.google.com/profiles/your.username” rel=”me” type=”text/html”>
When Google has re-crawled your site, you’ll be able to add in that site to your connected sites in Buzz. Use this tool to force a re-crawl of your site if you don’t want to wait.

I would recommend taking a look at that original post if you want a little more information, but if all you need is the basic steps without the full explanation like I wish I could have found a little more easily yesterday, well…now you got it.

Mar 31, 20100 notes

#Google Buzz #how to #social media

What can the music industry do to slow piracy? Improve the product

Last week brought my attention to a couple visual jabs at how DRM encourages piracy (here and here) in books and movies. The bottom line: piracy’s reach is larger because it provides a better, easier product than the legit stuff.

The music industry has learned a lot of lessons in the last ten years, but it still hasn’t figured out that the wall-less world we now live in requires that the industries think of illegal sharing not as piracy, but as a competing product. And the legitimate businesses are slow to compete. Here’s what the music business need to do to provide as good a product as piracy offers (and provide the kinds of lessons that the sellers of movies and books can really learn from):

Offer high-quality versions
While bitrates have gotten better over the years in mp3 stores like Lala and Amazon mp3, there’s still no variety. The only way you can legally get a fully lossless digital version of an album is to buy the CD and rip it, leaving you with a CD you don’t want. Anyone who’s ever been on Oink or any of the other private bittorrent trading sites will tell you that you can download albums in just about any format and quality you want.

Lower the price
I should not be paying $9.99 for a digital product. The standard for digital music should be half that: five dollars for an album, 50 cents for a song. The fact that 10 dollars is not really that much for an album isn’t a good enough reason. Don’t make the price point high enough to make people start researching how they can get it cheaper, because they’ll pretty quickly find that they can find it as cheap as it gets.

Provide flawless meta-data
One of the downsides of downloading music off the grid is that you get whatever you’re given. Some other user’s ratings, comments, and weird system of tagging. It’s a drag. So why do I often have to put in the year when buying from legal stores? Why do I have to fix the song titles and even the name of the band? There’s no excuse for the legal stores to have songs that are anything less than perfectly tagged.

Offer easy, customizable, non-restrictive embedding of full songs
Music bloggers don’t post mp3s because they want to illegally distribute: they just want people to be able to hear the songs they’re talking about. The industry needs to let stores offer embeddable songs and albums in the way that Lala has done, but without any restrictions at all: no sign-in required, full songs, customizable player. Even with Lala on the scene and the interesting Soundcloud/Hype Machine partnership, it’s still not enough. It needs to be as good a listening experience as you can get by posting the mp3s. And it’s nowhere near there.

Let artists offer their music for free through the for-sale channels
I don’t know why services don’t make it easier to allow their albums and songs to be downloaded for free through the online music stores. Imagine how much more attractive the iTunes music store would be if it had thousands of free songs as well; if up-and-coming bands who would rather give their songs away could point to iTunes and Amazon mp3 instead of Bandcamp.

Ultimately…
…pushing people to free download resources is bad for the industry not just because it’s taking money out of their pockets in the present, but it’s encouraging people to learn how to find good sources of pirated material, meaning that as time goes on, more and more people with comfortable with skirting the law. That’s something that none of the intellectual property owners can let happen in large numbers.

Mar 15, 20100 notes

#music #digital music

Some scattered thoughts on the money of digital music

If you haven’t already read Digital Audio Insider’s interview with Camper Van Beethoven’s Jonathan Segal¹, it’s a must read for anyone with even a slight interest in digital music and the money of the industry. Segal has tons of thoughts on just about every aspect of digital music, but best of all, he brings in these thoughts as someone whose initial music industry experience was in the days of purely-physical media, when “pirating” meant copying something onto a blank tape.

My main takeway is general and obvious but an important reminder: we are in a transition time for music, and what it will become is anyone’s guess. I think Segal’s take on merchandise and live performances taking the place as artist’s primary source of income as “asinine” is too harsh to be true, but I do think that we’re in such a state of transition that any shot at predicting artistic income in the future is completely in the dark. Such predictions are really only done as people try to grasp on to what they know. It may turn out to be true, but more likely, any future music profit is probably in something that we have a hard time thinking of right now.

I think that in the short term at least, creativity will flourish as people have much lesser expectations of making money. In my band in the mid 90’s, our high hopes were a massive burden. We constantly tried to figure out what labels we should contact and what important shows we should be playing and where and with who. It was part our personalities and ages, of course, but the idea that we could possibly do this for a living was a dream we were constantly chasing.

As my current band sets to put out our second release—the digital distro of which we’ll be taking care of ourselves—I’m stuck in between the desire to try and at least make back the money that we spent on the recording—however unlikely that might be—and just giving it away free: simply getting our music to as many people as possible. At this point, the former wins out, at least because I’m so curious about what’s possible for a band reaching out to the world from their computers. With social media and the various services and tools dedicated to artists, can we actually sell enough songs and albums to at least make a decent dent in our expenses? Or has the world changed enough so that music can no longer even be profitable?

Whatever happens, I’ll share our experiences with you as we gear up for our record’s release in May/June, as well as what happens after that. It’ll be an interesting ride.

¹ I should probably mention that I put extra weight in Segal’s opinion because Our Beloved Revolutionary Sweetheart broke new ground in my musical taste in the late 80’s. I still love that record.

Mar 11, 20100 notes

#music #digital music

The first apps I installed on my new iMac

My shiny new iMac arrived on my doorstep last week (in spite of Fed Ex’s inability to deliver it to the correct address), and I started up the Mac migration assistant to pull all the files and settings from my laptop, but…well, long story short, I decided to just start completely fresh: install the programs as I need them.

It’s a decision that’s made my new computer surprisingly fun, even if it’s made me swear angrily at it more than a few times as the judgment of the iSight beats down on me as if to say THIS IS THE LIFE YOU CHOSE.

It’s been interesting to me to see what downloads I went to first; a clear indicator of what’s most important to me on my computer. I moved over my iTunes library first, and then got to downloading. In order:

1. Google Chrome
Because Safari sucks. I mean, it doesn’t IE suck, but it Blogger sucks. At least. And seeing as how this is where I’d be going to get everything else I needed, it was a clear stop one.

2. Dropbox
All the files that I need in one easy download. Dropbox is the best. If you don’t already have it, you need it. Get it through this link and you’ll get a little extra storage space.

3. Google Notifier
Because I’ve gotten slightly addicted to the little “a-bong-bong” noise when I get a new email.

4. Quicksilver
I’ve never used Quicksilver to anywhere near the level it could be used, but being able to launch applications from the keyboard has become a huge part of my computing life, to the point where I feel slightly nauseated when I have to open up apps from the Start menu on the PC. Okay…not nauseated, but damn close.

Google’s QSB is the natural successor to Quicksilver, but until Quicksilver quits working, that’s my go-to.

(side note: I found this tutorial video to be very helpful when I first started with Quicksilver)

5. iscrobbler 1.5 (for last.fm)
Being a geek for music, history, and stats, I’m obsessed with my last.fm profile. I don’t want my last.fm profile to miss a thing that I play, so this was an early stop for me.

There was a problem, though: neither the official last.fm scrobbler or the most recent version of iscrobbler would transfer plays from my iPod to my last.fm profile. Which make both of them worthless. It seems to be a problem with Macs with external hard drives, but no one seemed to have an answer. So I went back to the one version of the iscrobbler that I knew worked: way back to 1.5.

As a side note, it’s amazing to me when companies don’t ensure that their core product doesn’t work perfectly.

6. Tweetdeck
My use of Twitter was transformed when I started using Tweetdeck. Before, it was a service that I used and liked, but never quite got. I tried Seesmic and I’m not sure why it seemed so confusing to me, but it did, and Tweetdeck was the Twitter translator that I needed.

7. Transmission
A great, lightweight Mac bittorrent client. If you’re into that sort of thing. Which I’m not.

What about you? What would be a crucial installment for you on a new computer?

Note: my use of that iMac image should not be construed as an endorsement of the Star Trek movie, which will not only never show on my iMac, but will hopefully never show on another screen in front of my face ever again.

Mar 02, 20101 note

#Google Chrome #Tweetdeck #Google #Twitter #Quicksilver #Mac #Transmission #last.fm

Takeaways from Tools Of Change

I spent the earlier part of last week at the Tools Of Change for Publishers conference in New York. I was a first-timer at the conference and was thrilled to be with other people who are at the intersection of publishing and tech, since I’m completely comfortable with the latter, but still feel like a bit of an outsider with the former. Here’s a few thoughts from the conference (with an aside disclaimer that these are my opinions entirely):

Don’t panic! Oh. Good. Well done, then
In contrast with the Book Expo America (BEA) conference in New York last year—where publishers were frantic to know what they could do to at least slow their impending doom—this conference was largely panic-free. There was a feeling that the changes upon us are exciting; to be embraced and not feared.
Now, the road ahead still seems far from clear. There are a lot of people with a lot of different ideas, and the future of publishing has just started forming, but there was still an excited curiosity of how we’ll get there.

ebooks in 2010=web pages in 2001
The first presentation that I saw at TOC was a workshop on the formatting of eBooks, and it hit me quickly and hard that I’ve gotten spoiled by the advances of the last few years with web pages. We’re much more used to being able to push a button and easily convert one format to another without really having to check it. But because the formatting of ebooks are still in their early stage, there is no magic conversion. It’s not just QA: it’s having to go through each book for both ePub and Kindle files and making tweaks so that they render properly.

This seems completely obvious, and I’m a little embarrassed as I type it out, but we tried converting books in batches and it was a mess. At least at the moment, ebooks need to be produced in the same way that print publications are produced: one at a time, with care and fine-toothed comb. As much as people tried to say that a good in-house CSS file will allow quicker converting in batches, it seems clear that the only way to get a quality ebook product is to produce them in the same way as you would a print book.

How much book should be in an ebook?
A popular topic was the enhancement of ebooks. Several of the speakers talked about hyperlinks and enhanced content (even video!) in ebooks, basically extending them beyond the words of printed books. There was the understandable concern that this would interrupt the immersion in a book. Maybe book immersion is an old-fashioned concept, but it does blur the line between book and application that I think made some people uncomfortable.

And speaking of apps, there was a lot of talk of iPhone apps, mostly as a marketing device, where an iPhone app could be a companion piece to a book. But it was clear that there are already people talking about the books as more web and app-like experiences, and from beyond just words on an electronic page. Already! And before we can even get the formatting of ebooks done right!

The early days of eBook stats
One of the my favorite presentations was on a survey done by BISG on ebook consumers in November of 2009 and this past January. It was made clear that these are very early stats and easy to argue with, but they were still fascinating. Some of the notable statistics (and I hope I have these right…they were from my notes, so give a 2-3 point margin of error on the numbers):

11% of the ebook readers said that they didn’t purchase ebooks, leading the survey collectors to gather that they were probably getting them illegally. I think that there’s more free content available that they may not be taking into consideration, but it’s still a pretty shocking number.
Between 45 and 50% used a PC to read ebooks. One of those numbers that’s surprising at first and less so if you think about it, but it does show that ebook reader devices are still not good enough to be widely used.
24% of ebook users said that if no ebook was available for three months, that they would go ahead and buy the hardback. This seemed awfully high to me, and surely is a number that will lower pretty quickly. On the other hand, as could be said about so many of these stats, it probably depends a great deal on the book.

DRM will be with us for a while
This is a subject I could talk a lot more about (and probably will). One of the sessions was called “DRM, Digital Content, and the Consumer Experience: Lessons Learned from the Music Industry”, and people were getting riled up. The Q&A wasn’t blemished with a single Q, and instead was a bunch of people animatedly dancing around this point: we want DRM. I know that there were plenty of folks in that room who agreed as I did with presenter’s point that DRM does more harm than good, but there were a lot of people who are just too bothered by the idea of people not paying for their content that they want something that will keep them from doing it. Of course, none of them actually said that, but it was clear that publishers are going to want some sort of DRM until the current model of publishing is completely gone.

It’s here until the end. I’m sorry to say, but I think that there’s a lot of publishers who just aren’t willing to give up the control that DRM provides, however false the sense of security it gives.

And a word for the publishers from The Publisher
Tim O’Reilly gave his traditional keynote, saving it for very last this year. It was a good speech, with some great quotes, and the main point was a message of reassurance: there will always be the need for publishers. No matter how much the business may change, there will still be a need for distributors and promoters. The publishing may change into something that, process-wise, is almost unrecognizable from what we had today, but there will always be the need for people between creator and consumer.

Mar 01, 20107 notes

#ebooks #publishing #Tools of Change #DRM

Reid Dossinger

March 2010

5 posts