Changes Is Good

I signed up to get Michael Moore’s latest documentary Slacker Uprising a few weeks ago and this morning I received an email telling me it was now available. The documentary covers Moore’s failed bid to oust Bush the Lesser from office by giving out Raman Noodles and clean undies. With none of the emotional impact of Sicko and none of the laughs of An American Carol Slacker Uprising is being distributed online for free (or $9.95 for the DVD). The movie can be watched on Blip.tv, iTunes and Lycos or downloaded from Amazon, iTunes and Hypernia.

However, despite the free-love goodness and the clear support for Obama, Michael Moore has failed to take a page from the Obama social media playbook and leverage social media to get the movie’s message out. The Slacker Uprising site has no way to embed or super-distribute the movie (missed the button) no way to comment or rally support around it, there isnt even a means for people to indicate support or provide any feedback on the film. All fairly standard social media tools, which would extend the viral distribution of the film, defray some of the cost and amplify its message.

The Obama presidential campaign will be remembered for its many first. The first bi-racial presidential candidate, the first presidential candidate to acknowledge his black children, the first presidential candidate with an African first name and the first presidential candidate to release a digital CD.

The compilation was put together by the good folks at Hidden Beach Recordings, best known for removing the arsine ramblings of ignorant buffoons from popular rap songs and making them palatable to anyone with a 5th grade education, in the UnRapped Jazz series. The CD is only available from the Obama campaign store, and will set you back $25 bucks for the digital download or $30 bucks for the physical CD. All proceeds from the the CD will go to the Obama/Biden ticket. After the election the CD will be released to retail stores around the country.

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This is part of the presentation I gave in Chicago, it started off the sessions and was intended to give people an understanding of the terms, phrases and language of Web 2.0 pundits and users. In a strange twist, all the audio from this session was lost and so the presentation is sans audio.

The story on the first two slides is that those words were literally something I heard during the Start-up Riot here in atlanta. I use that as an example of both the extreme nerdiness of which I am sometimes a part as well as how every much the language of Web 2.0 has moved beyond MBA speak. The point I try and drive home with these slides is that you need to know the lingo to be a part of the game and you need to understand the lingo to play it. I no longer include The Long Tail in presentations because it is so hard to convey the idea, the controversies and rebuttals without either spending 10 minutes on it or getting uber geeky and referring to power laws.

I’ve never been a fan of the Zune, back in November of ‘06 I laid out 10 reasons the Zune would fail and was surprised by the number of Zune fans that told me I was dead wrong. Of course the ultimate expression of Zune fandom was when Steve Smith’s got himself tattooed with the ZUNE logo.

This was social media at its best. A fan interested in a product takes up the mantel of that product on behalf of the brand and evangelizes for it in their own communities. Even I had to second guess my Zune bashing, if a seemingly sane man was willing to permanently brand himself with its logo for no money or other consideration.

Fast forward two years and the flip side of social media shows how quickly a brand can be torn down. The Zune tattoo guy is back and he is not happy. In a video posted to YouTube mszunefan (aka Zune Tattoo guy) outlines why he is unhappy with Microsoft. In a fairly damning and somewhat compelling video he highlights why he thinks the product has failed and its lack of future prospects. Clearly indicating the the 50 thousand people who have watchde it so far that they should avoid the Zune.

From fan to foe in a Web 2.0 minute. Social media giveth and social media taketh away.

With gas prices through the roof and sales of gas guzzlers in free fall it really shouldnt come as a surprise that the big auto makers are readjusting plans and making changes. Besides blue-collar layoffs and office cut-backs, it seems that even the folks on Madison avenue may also have to worry a bit as auto-makers shift their spending to Digital or reduce spending altogether.

A couple of days ago Ad Age ran a story about Ford taking $20 million off the table as it reduced it’s ad spending from $300 million to only $100 million due to the free fall in truck sales. Another article that caught my eye, also on Ad Age, highlighted that GM has shifted close to 25% of its advertising from traditional platforms to digital media venues. Thats everything from SEO strategies to CRM implementations slated to get a 25% chunk of GM’s multi-billion dollar ad largess.

If you’re a traditional advertising agency this is the point where you get to quaking in your boots and if you’re a digital shop, my resume is up-to-date and ready to send.

Was just looking at Paul Lamere’s list of accepted papers for the ISMIR conference and they are amazing. The academics are once again showing the executives how innovative thinking can move the industry towards solving users practical problems and create new business opportunities along the way.

At least the academics have really begun to build the tools that will make the celestial jukebox and unlimited music locker a commercially viable and practical product. Which is kinda funny when you think about it because thats actually the job of the Harvard MBA’s in the executives suites collecting big checks. If you work in or around media, these are the papers you should probably read and use to guide your thinking about the industry. Marketing, especially for media, will be largely algorithmic and these are some of the early experiments in creating the algorithms that will result in discovery and hopefully sales.

The papers that look the most promising:
- A Comparison Of Signal-Based Music Recognitionmmendation to Genre Labels, Collaborative Filtering, Musicological Analysis, Human Recommendation, and Random Baseline Terence Magno and Carl Sable

- Armonique: Experiments In Content-Based Similarity Retrieval Using Power-Law Melodic and Timbre Metrics Bill Manaris, Dwight Krehbiel, Patrick Roos and Thomas Zalonis

- Moodswings: A Collaborative Game For Music Mood Label Collection Youngmoo Kim, Erik Schmidt and Lloyd Emelle

- Oh Oh Oh Whoah! Towards Automatic Topic Detection In Song Lyrics Florian Kleedorfer, Peter Knees and Tim Pohle

-Social Playlists and Bottleneck Measurements : Exploiting Musician Social Graphs Using Content-Based Dissimilarity and Pairwise Maximum

I wasnt able to find a couple of them but if f anyone has any of these papers I would love to see them or if your blogging from the conference could you please post or email me a link.

This is a SlideCast presentation of online content offerings beyond BET.com. The discussion was lead by m friend Guy Primus VP of Interactive Media for Overbrook Entertainment. Edited out much of the Q&A and some of the incredibly fun banter we had during the session to save on time.

An interesting article from the good folks at TorrentFreak. While it wont have any of the humor and fireworks ThePirateBay brings to the party, I still think this will be an interesting battle. Mininova doesnt run a tracker or host files it is truly only pointing in the general direction of both legal and questionable torrent files. However the Dutch anti-piracy outfit BRIEN disagrees.
<Insert trite music industry is doomed comment here> blah </insert>

I noticed that the article keeps referencing the DMCA, which as a US law and as such probably has little applicability as a defense in a Dutch courtroom. Hope the folks at MiniNova have a better battle plan up their sleeve then “we kinda follow a fuzzy US law”. The Dutch agency persuing the case counts among is success forcing Demonoid offline for a couple of months and getting them to move their popular bitTorrent tracker to a different ISP.
<Insert music industry loves whack-a-mole comment here> blah </insert>

I thought this was a joke at first but apparently its real. Google is now officially in the health market. Read the full release after the jump but the following line baffled me.

“Partnership Allows Patients the Ability to Share their Prescription History”

Why exactly would I want to share my Valtrex, Vicodin and Viagra prescriptions with everyone in the pharmacy back office?

Continue reading ‘FYI: Longs Drugs Partners With Google on the Launch of Google Health’