TheWayoftheWeb

Having been active online for over a decade, I’m happy to say that I’m still pleasantly amazed by some of the things I’m able to find online.

For instance, due to the seemingly endless repeats of Scrubs on the E4 TV channel, and the fact it’s the only bearable TV show at 7pm as my son is finally going to bed, I’ve had a song from one episode stuck in my head.

I’m old enough to remember a time when that snapshot of a song would have played in  my head for days, weeks or years – unless one of my real life friends happened to know what it was, or a magazine tc happened to mention it.

Image by graciepoo on Flickr (CC Licence)

Instead, a google search for ‘Scrubs, Brendan Fraser, Song’ led to to the exact tune: ‘Hold on Hope’ by Guided by Voices.

Then, thanks to Last.fm’s ’similar artists’, I was able to listen to solo work by members of the band, and within a couple of degrees of seperation, end up at the interesting (and brilliantly-named) Psycho and the Birds side project.

Then a bit of background reading on Guided by Voices on Wikipedia (slightly more detail than Last.fm entries tend to have).

I love the internet for the things it allows me to do, not what it is.

And in a funny coincidence, my random library on Last.fm just threw up an old Lemonheads track -

After an interview in a magazine, I discovered The Lemonheads were on Taang Records, and would buy anything I found on that label without ever hearing it – leading to good stuff like The Mighty Mighty Bosstones, and some absolutely terrible purchases.

Having always preferred the writing/singing of Ben Deily, who left before The Lemonheads hit mainstream success, I was idly googling his name and trying to find out about what happened after he left.

I ended up finding Ben Deily’s website, discovering his new band, Varsity Drag, realising they were on tour in Europe, asking if if was possible to interview Ben for the online magazine I was doing at the time (see a PDF of the gig review/interview here), buying a copy of the album on CD, and a CD of a previous project I’d missed, and a T-shirt from the gig.

And it’s safe to say I’m guaranteed to be at any future European gigs/buying future CDs – particularly as my other half confessed to being rather smitten with Ben after her first pop-punk gig. And all from an imported CD from 1988 (now signed), that I bought on the strength of hearing songs by an entirely different band lineup.

To close the rambling love letter to music with some sort of point:

Somewhere in there, there’s a business model for musicians/the music industry. The internet allowed me to find a musician who wouldn’t be stocked in local music stores, read his website and blog, find out tour dates, arrange an interview, publicise his music to more people, buy physical copies as much as mementoes as to play, buy a T-shirt, and sign myself up to buy future releases, T-shirts, and see gigs whenever I can.

There’s a tendency to look at User Generated Content and online collaboration as an easy way to create content, products and services without some of the hassles of a traditional business.

And it’s easy to understand why: No ground rent, no equipment or infrastructure costs, no limitations on who can be involved etc. And no need to necessarily pay contributors.

But it isn’t an easy option, and there are several major risks to any online collaboration which requires more than one or two people:

Trust: How quickly do you place your trust in people to deliver on their promises, to deliver them on time, and not to take good ideas elsewhere?

Management: Is there some kind of leadership or guidance to keep things moving, and to clearly articulate the vision and strategy etc – which may have been decided democratically. How do you keep momentum going and inspire people to continue even when things can be tough?

Politics: How do you deal with disagreements? Infighting? Rivalry?

Reward: How do you supply a justifiable return to contributors for their time? Financial or otherwise?

Communication: How do you keep people updated, and make things simple and easy to contribute?

Those are just the first few problems off the top of my head. The reason they come to mind is that I have basically decided to cut all responsibility for Disposable Media, leaving only the possibility of contributing the occasional blog post or article at some point.

It’s been a lot of fun, particularly when I was given the honour of being Editor, and we had a fast growth in audience – all from a group of people working for no financial reward and contributing articles, designs etc via a forum. In my time on DM, I only ever met two of my colleagues in real life in the space of two years!

But having realised that I don’t have the time and energy to drive DM forward, I stepped down to take a back seat and a more advisory role. And what then happened was quite painful to watch, as some infighting and sabotage began, communication became worse, trust was lost, and many people started drifting away.  I don’t place all the blame on the Editor who replaced me, as there have definitely been people who have used a period of change for their own agenda.

Hopefully it will rise from the ashes, as over the years it’s had some very talented people, and some great articles and content. On the bright side, it’s shown me that although I was far from perfect, and made several mistakes, I did achieve a lot in keeping things going, and always trying to drive more organised and efficient systems to make life easier for everyone – and it also highlighted the need for communication and rewards, which will hopefully help me on other projects.

To be honest, the real risk to online magazines isn’t just the problems of collaboration – it’s also the arrival of new aggregated delivery services in a magazine format – i.e. systems that take your favourites from services like Last.fm, and then produce a custom magazine around them, like Idiomag. It plays on a simple philosophy of mine which is becoming more and more realistic and reinforced – ‘The most effective targeting of an individual, is the targeting they do for themselves‘

By nature, I’m a frustrated librarian and a compulsive hoarder. My music collection is in alphabetical and chronological order, and my loft is packed with old video consoles and other collections which I know fatherhood will stop me from indulging in, except as family heirlooms in 30 years time!

Part of this is a reluctance to lend CDs and books, even to close friends, for fear of them being lost, or being returned with the spine of the book broken beyond all recognition.

But now access to knowledge and entertainment is instantly sharable from the moment of discovery. From the almost infinite resource of online knowledge I can share findings via links, Del.icio.us bookmarks, or RSS. My tastes in music are logged, and accessible via Last.fm, and TV and videos get distributed from Youtube, the BBC iPLayer, or where ever they’re found. And it doesn’t matter if my friends lose them, and they can’t return them broken. In fact, even if, God forbid, I lost all my saved files and links, I could find most of the memorable ones that mattered in a few minutes with Google.

There’s a popular quote by author and broadcaster Leo Laporte which has spread via shared links:

“I’m less likely to read print lately because I can’t tag, bookmark, and share the stories. Info gathering has become a social process for me”

And it rings true. Print and physical copies are now back-ups, or objects for sentimental value. They’re for those rare occasions that you want to get away from it all.

And that’s why I love links!

Normally internet usability refers to the design and placement on a website to allow users to easily interact, but I firmly believe there’s an important new item which is hugely important in making any website, widget or service usable.

And that’s allowing centralisation.

Now I’ve moved to my own domain, I’m trying to update two years of links – on social networks, blog directories, wikis, forums, websites, other people’s blogrolls etc, etc, etc. And I’ve realised exactly how much work is involved in changing my url on all those sites. And that’s the same for all the major events in my life (such as the birth of my son recently), or even keeping minor details up-to-date and relevant (Do I still like the same music and films as I did when I filled out my Facebook profile, or the last time I updated Myspace?).

More and more people are online, and although the numbers of promiscuous profile creators are small compared to those who are happy with one site and profile, that’s changing. And it will change more and more as niche networks and groups form and grow – and advertisers etc see more value in targetting those niches.

It’s where ideas like Google Open Social work, with an API that works across numerous websites/networks. And although I don’t think it’s always suitable to limit every internet user to one ‘real’ linked ID, I do think it’s now essential that anyone collating information from internet users looks at the best way to allow that information to be updated from one central place. You might lose one or two clicks from someone being forced to update, if they see enough value – but the flipside is it’s too much hassle to update so people don’t bother coming back at all – ever.

And for something like a domain change, it can mean a website stops sending me any referrals, and drops even further off my radar.

That’s why something like Last.fm works, and why so many more users utilise its’ ’scrobbling’ technology to track the music they listen to, rather than using it to find new music etc. If you’ve got a site which has a field to list music, don’t make me fill it out. Let me link to Last.fm, or Pandora. Or create somewhere that I can update once and feed out to all my various outlets. That’s one reason why Twitter works (I’m @badgergravling btw). A Twitter update can be done via a variety of desktop clients or other sources, and then end up on my blog, on FriendFeed etc, etc. Sites like FriendFeed are tackling the problem from the aggregation perspective, and allowing a huge range of inputs to be put into one place – but where’s a system for allowing me to make a huge range of outputs to all the relevant destinations without traipsing for hours around the net?