To me, Fader’s news of Blu’s challenge of releasing 763 albums (all collaborations), supported by 1,892 videos over the course of the approaching summer is an extreme example of how digital is changing way we consume music. With over 16,000 friends on MySpace, he’s certainly got the support. Without the creative restrictions of a major label deal it looks like he’ll simply be putting everything out and allowing the natural filter of the hardcore fans to decide what sinks or swims. In Blu’s own words “YallProllyBeSickOfHearingYaBoyBy’09″.
People seem to be loving muxtape.com right now, and quite right too. It’s a super-simple and elegant way of comping together music for a friend, family member or someone you hope desperately to spoon.
There is this wonderful little invention called Twitter that is currently growing in popularity. At first it sounds fairly dreary, but it’s basically a way of broadcasting exactly what you are doing at any given moment. If you’re familiar with Facebook it’s basically the same as updating your status. You can update your status via SMS, email, online or IM. It’s very easy, which is obviously one of it’s greatest selling points. You can follow people’s tweets and therefore stay abreast of what they are up to. It seems to completely divide people right now, people either love it or loathe it. Marketers might consider it a form of eCRM that can work like email or RSS. Normal people use it as a way of staying in touch with their mates.
Apparently, a quantum leap in the growth of the micro-blogging platform came about because of mass Tweeting at SXSW.
Just as an indication of how close to the tipping point Twitter is, here some a list of surprising Twitter users.
A phrase you often hear bandied around is “advertising online doesn’t work, people don’t click on banners”. There was a study by Jakob Nielson last summer which used eye tracking techniques to discover that users don’t click or even look at banner adverts. I am a big fan of Nielson’s studies but I’m fairly appalled by this study. My main problem with it is that lab conditions are completely unrealistic. Giving users specific tasks and then tracking their eye movement to record the user’s focus is not representative of real life. In real life people do have real needs and goals but they don’t have the constant feeling that they are being judged as they do in a lab situation.
Plenty of people at JPMH have been excited about Adobe’s new AIR platform. AIR is something that you install on your desktop that allows you to run standalone applications that can be built using standard Flash ActionScript (the scripting language used to Flash apps), this is what’s known as a runtime environment and is exactly how Java works. It’s a bit like running web sites but on your desktop. There’s a couple of quite interesting possibilities with AIR. From a brand’s perspective, if you can make a download-able application that is useful, compelling or exciting enough for people to install then you have the equivalent of a door-to-door salesman’s dream of being invited into a consumer’s home for a nice chat on the sofa with a cuppa tea and a nice slice of cake. ActionScript is a relatively easy language to master when compared with languages such Java and C++; languages normally associated with desktop applications. This is mostly because you don’t have to worry about such tedious little things as memory management, that’s all taken care of for you. ActionScript then becomes much more interesting when you can actually save things to the user’s hard drive and have a database that can live on the computer’s hard drive.
AIR has been in development for a while but it has only recently become stable enough to become exciting. Northcode has been doing something similar for years and has lots more functionality, however, Adobe are offering an imposing and compelling alternative by making it open-source, essentially allowing other developers to add to and refine the AIR runtime environment itself. This is partially because AIR itself uses a number of open-source technologes such as WebKit and SQLLite.
Here’s an interesting interview on Wired from Adobe’s tech premier Kevin Lynch
There’s been lots of talk recently about Facebook losing visitors recently, mostly feulled by data from Hitwise. There’s a lot of bloggers publicly committing virtual hare-kari, which can’t be a great sign. Average visit time is right up though, up to almost 23 minutes, in fact. Most sites would kill for a dwell time like that. Marketing Pilgrim has an amusing little explanation.
