StraussBlog

I just came from checking out Lucas on a Social Media Club LA panel on something about technology and music, apparently there’s some kind of intersection there. Who knew? Anyway, the organizers projected a live stream of all the tweets tagged with #smcla on a screen behind the panelists during the entire panel. 

This has become a pretty common “feature” of tech panels nowadays, and I’m heareby asking organizers to knock it off.

There are a couple of reasons I feel this way. First of all, I don’t know how anyone in the audience could really pay any attention to what the panelists were saying seeing as the *entire audience* seemed to be on their mobile devices or laptops writing things to show up on screen (myself included). Secondly (and more importantly), the majority of the shit that went up there was totally lame (with the noted exception of this Sarah Palin tweet). Most people who get up to speak during Q&A time at panels are really doing it to hear themselves speak and try to impress the panelists and/or audience (”I’d like to pose my question in the form of a statement about how awesome I am, please validate/hire/sleep with me”). The good news is those Q&A sessions are generally short, and there is a physical limit on how many people can actually speak on the mic at any one time. Well when you put that Twitter stream up there, every self-important douche in the room can post his/her little cry for attention, and they generally do (again, including me).

Don’t get me wrong, I think real-time audience feedback is a valuable tool to keep any panel on track (I’m too lazy to search the web for the numerous stories of panels turned around by moderators monitoring audience tweets or find the right link to the Sarah Lacey SXSW debacle). But, the devil’s in the details and you’ve got to implement it in a way that preserves the right incentives for the audience to participate — i.e. improving the conversation, not trying to steal the spotlight. I was actually at what I believe was the first conference to use an interactive real-time feedback system. It was the >play conference in November 2006, and I blogged at the time about how Michael Arrington was a total prick for asking the organizers to take the SMS-based audience feedback system powered by Mozes off the screen behind the panel (ironically, this panel and the Valleywag story that came out of it may have driven the first significant tipping point for Twitter adoption).

As much as it pains me to agree with Arrington nearly two years after the fact, I do think there is a reason to have a moderator and a good moderator should be entrusted with the power to steer the panel discussion. The moderator should definitely be watching the conversation about the panel on Twitter in real-time and reacting accordingly, and individual audience members who want to have *virtual* side conversation should feel free to do so on their laptops or devices. But, don’t give individual audience members the opportunity (and encouragement) to distract the rest of the audience by putting their comments on (or above) the level of the panelists.

If your audience is that smart, put them on the panel. And if your moderator needs to be babysat by your audience, get a better moderator.

As my (legion of) followers on Twitter know, I’m at the TechCrunch50 this week. I’m here helping an Israeli startup with the launch of their product Flyscreen in the Demo Pit yesterday and today (cause I just *love* booth duty that much).

As painful as booth duty is, yesterday was actually fun because there were some cool people to hang out with. I smuggled in Eric, ran into Debs, and got to meet Andrew and Ben. I’m not sure if it’s just TC50 or the “Web 2.0″ conference scene in general, but there was definitely a pervasive vibe of shark jumpage in the air and anyone worth caring about was basically taking the piss out of all the other people taking this thing way too seriously. And now, for the footage…

There was a dude walking around dressed as Abraham Lincoln (don’t ask), and I had recently been told that my current ’stache made me look like John Wilkes Booth. So, we decided to film a dramatic reenactment of the assasination of Abraham Lincoln in the TC50 Demo Pit. Andrew was on camera, Eric made it happen by being the only one with the balls to proposition Abe, and the dude playing Abe was a real sport (and a seriously talented actor ). Enjoy!

After that, things really started getting out of hand. While I got pulled off to do some demo work, the crew decided to move on to trying the world’s worst pitch on an unsuspecting VC. Hilarity ensues…

P.S. Even though Eric claims to have come up with this pitch idea independently, there is actually prior art.

My buddy Hooman just wrote an insightful post expounding on a phrase I’ve been using for a long time now (and have yet to hear elsewhere, so let’s make it a meme baby!): consumption as self-expression. It’s a pretty self-explanatory phrase and examples include: Last.fm favorite artist or recently listened songs badges on your MySpace page (or their pretty cool Facebook app); publishing your Netflix queue via RSS; using a plug-in like Postalicious to add your Delicious bookmarks to your blog (as I do); or services like All Consuming. Each of these services has a primary value proposition to get you to give them your consumption information other than republishing it out to the world (i.e. Last.fm = discovering new music; Netflix = getting the movies delivered; Delicious = archiving bookmarks for personal reference; All Consuming = getting recommendations on other stuff you might like). But, the ability to share your consumption information back to your social network (or publish it to the world, if you so choose) is becoming an increasingly important secondary value proposition.

As an example of how powerful the self-expression value proposition has become, take Flixster, which became a top app on Facebook by getting people to re-enter much of the ratings information that they had already given to Netflix just so they could have a social experience around it with their friends. Apps like Flixster and What I’m Listening To (by Last.fm) finally start to address the forgotten backwater of the social network profile page that the “Interests” section has become. Like the appendix or the vestigial tail, the Favorite Books/TV Shows/Movies/Music fields on today’s social network profiles are left over from the first designs of Friendster (or maybe even before) and have done nothing but atrophy since. Unlike your tastes, these fields are static, and they’re totally disconnected from your consumption experiences. So, I’m all about the apps that have allowed me to leave the ‘Favorite Movies’ and ‘Favorite Music’ fields on my Facebook profile blank and instead show my friends what I’m actually watching and listening to.

That’s the good part of consumption as self-expression, IMHO. But, I’m increasingly finding a bad part too and it’s the growing (g33k) trend of lifestreaming. I see the value in wanting to broadcast a consolidated feed of everything public you’re doing across the web to those interested (in fact, I’ve already installed a lifestreaming plug-in on this blog and have yet to set it up — you can also use Friendfeed or MyBlogLog). I’m just not particularly interested in subscribing to anyone else’s. I may want to *pull* this information, when I’m trying to learn about what a person likes or has been up to, by visiting his Facebook page or blog. But, I have negative interest in having this information *pushed* to me at all times, a la Friendfeed, which I only use as a broadcast medium and not for consumption.

This is where the whole idea of the social signal:noise ration comes in. In his original post on which I commented, Hooman distinguishes between “machine-generated” and “human-generated” updates. The machine-generated ones are what I call consumption as self-expression, while the human-generated are the ones like blog posts, Flickr photos, or Twitter messages that require some kind of proactive communication on the part of the publisher. In my recent post about Twitter, I talked about how the on-demand nature of the Internet enables us to have a signal:noise ratio approaching infinity and how Twitter was the restorative “white noise of cyberspace.” But, I see full-on lifestreaming with machine-generated updates and all as going too far. So for now, I have imposed a crude filter to limit what noise I let in: if you didn’t take the time to generate the content yourself, I ain’t subscribing to it.

And, even that may not be enough. As the circle of people I follow on Twitter has expanded (and I *only follow people I’ve actually met*), I’m finding even that increasingly annoying and less the valuable randomness generator it used to be. Over beers today, Jeffrey suggested maybe as more people start using Twitter and the average number of people being followed grows, there will be less “updates on what I ate or when I went to the bathroom.” Whether it’s some kind of social networking mores or a technical solution like Laurie’s Havoc algorithm (ask him about it), we’re definitely going to need something to steer the social web back to a more sustainable signal:noise ratio.

Only something this tasteless could truly capture the frivolity of the compulsive Twittering that afflicts me and many of the people I know. Deep-down, we all know we could never get away with this level of self-important blather in any other communication medium (well, other than lifecasting, of course). But as long as others keep “listening” (following != really listening) and retaliating with their own narcissistic brain-farts, we continue to groupthink ourselves into the delusion that the emperor is wearing some skivvies and it’s completely acceptable behavior to broadcast an announcement of your recovery from a hangover, random facts you learn from reading the pamphlets you get at jury duty, or a poll on how you should waste away your afternoon to everyone you know and even more people you don’t (just, whatever you do, *never* *ever* update people on your flight delays at the airport — sheesh!). My personal favorites are the recursive loops of self-importance (better known to the self-important as “meta-tweets”), like announcing on Twitter that you’re blogging about how stupid Twitter is. But, if the Nielsen TV ratings ponzi scheme can last as long as it has, I, for one, will not be dissuaded from spewing the mindless ephemera of my life out into the ether by a little incisive snark from a couple of “professional” bloggers. Enjoy

In writing all of that, I did get to thinking a little bit about why (relatively) intelligent and well-adjusted people are totally comfortable with our behavior on Twitter (at least until its absurdity is temporarily called out, as above). The answer may be that it isn’t, in fact, that absurd after all. For people who live their lives at the leading edge of consumer technology, our signal:noise ratio in daily life is rapidly approaching Infinity. Is it possible that the human condition demands some degree of noise to have a balanced life — think about it, a life in which nothing is random or serendipitous (i.e. all signal) doesn’t sound too fun. Eliminating the noise in meatspace can practically only go so far, but in cyberspace, where our kind now spends most of our time, the vast majority of products and services have been designed to give you nothing but signal. Twitter (and to a certain degree other social software, like the Facebook newsfeed) can theoretically be adjusted to be all signal, but the entropy of its design tends towards providing you with noise, be it noise of your choosing. Maybe Twitter is the cyberspace equivalent of one of those sleep machines that emits white noise to help you sleep at night.

[Updated February 17, 2008. Comments #1-3 are in response to the original full-length post, which can be found here.]

I’ve been marinating on this post for a few weeks now, but haven’t gotten around to it because of some other events I’ll blog about soon. However after only being reminded that the Grammys were tonight by the fact that two people I know were looking to give away their tickets, I felt this was an appropriate night to dig in and get ‘er done.

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That the music industry is currently undergoing a profound transformative change is not news by any means. And, the retrospective analysis of the whys and the hows of this change is well-trod territory at this point. But, I don’t feel there is much clarity, let alone consensus, around what the future of the music business will look like, which I believe is a much more interesting conversation. My personal view is that it will look a lot like Saul Williams, in honor of whom this post is titled.

Saul’s latest album, The Inevitable Rise and Liberation of Niggy Tardust, was produced by Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails and quietly released in October in a manner very similar to Radiohead’s In Rainbows — with consumers being able to choose between downloading an inferior version for free or paying to download a higher quality version (both DRM-free). Not many people noticed until a few weeks ago when Reznor, unlike Radiohead, posted the sales figures on the NIN blog (which for some unfathomable reason doesn’t have publicly visible archives — but, you can read the original text here) and said he found them “disheartening.” His subsequent interview on the subject with CNET provides a view into the mind of someone who looks at the Internet and digital distribution as basically new tools to propagate the legacy record industry business model.

If that had been all, I would have just chocked it up to music business as usual. But, then Saul jumped into the mix and pretty much blew my mind. In his own interview with CNET in response to Trent’s, Saul basically defined the archetype of my vision of the musical artist of the future, and in so doing illustrated where IMHO the music industry is headed. In contrast to Trent, Saul characterized himself as “extremely optimistic” based on the results of the online promotion. This polar opposite reaction is illustrative of a fundamental difference between the two artists that is best summed up in Saul’s own words:

I think Trent’s disappointment probably stems from being in the music business for over 20 years and remembering a time that was very different, when sales reflected something different, when there was no such thing as downloads. Trent is from another school. Even acts that prospered in the ’90s, you look at people like the Fugees or Lauren Hill selling 18 million copies. That sort of thing is unheard of today. But Trent comes from that world. So I think his disappointed stems from being heavily invested in the past. For modern times, for modern numbers we’re looking great, especially for being just two months into a project.

Williams goes on to talk about the importance to his livelihood of what the record industry has historically characterized as secondary revenue streams, like concert ticket and merchandise sales. The record industry has generally viewed these revenue streams mostly as promotion for their recorded music/packaged good business, in no small part because the artists and their management keep the bulk of the touring revenues and the labels keep the bulk of the record sales. However, touring has now become such a profit center for artists that Madonna now has an event company as a label. And just like how in the late 80’s and early 90’s artists started making songs with the music video in mind to take advantage of the emerging promotional power of MTV, you now have “ringtone rappers” overtly writing music to maximize the extremely profitable mobile revenue stream. By locking out emerging artists and ripping off established ones, the record industry has forced them to make money from sources other than recorded music, thus sowing the seeds of its own destruction. As a result, the new breed of artists now sees recorded music not as a primary revenue stream but as promotion for other revenue streams that go (more) directly into their own pockets.

At the end of the same interview with CNET, Williams also talks about how, even with Reznor’s backing, they couldn’t find a label that could wrap its head around what Williams was trying to do. It basically boiled down to the fact that none of the labels’ marketing departments had a promotional formula set-up for a black alternative artist. While defying the ability to be pigeonholed into a particular genre is to be admired artistically, it’s apparently not so desirable in the record industry. Because it’s a packaged goods business with high fixed costs (advances, studio time, sample clearances, mastering), relatively low variable costs (pressing and shipping CDs), and extremely high opportunity costs (promotion and shelf-space could be going to that Rihanna record that’s a lot more likely to sell), the model only works if you can aggregate a substantial audience around any given product. The marketing formulae the labels use are designed to predict and maximize the probability of aggregating the largest possible audience. And black alternative acts just don’t cross that bar.

But, the cost structure of digital distribution (mostly the even lower variable costs and the diminimus opportunity costs) lower that bar considerably. 154,449 people downloaded Niggy Tardust (of those, only 28,322 paid) in the first 3 months with no paid promotion, that’s almost 5x what Williams’ self-titled first album has done in nearly 4 years since its release. So it’s not the fact that no audience exists for a black alternative artist, it’s the fact that audience isn’t big enough to make money from CD sales. But it’s apparently plenty big for Williams to make a living from touring, merchandise, and other revenue streams. Last weekend I was over at Ian’s and we were talking about the Yeasayer album, which I only recently discovered but Ian told me was a blog favorite of 2007. We agreed it was an album that probably wouldn’t have even been made 10 years ago (or if it was, would have resulted in the sacking of whatever young A&R exec snuck it through). But through the magic of the interwebs, these guys are now going on tour and selling out shows in LA and SF.

As we all know, the Internet has the power to unite people around a common interest, creating substantial audiences where little to none was thought to exist before. The result of this is that the tens of discrete genre-based marketing formulae Hollywood has relied on to program popular culture through mass media for the last 50 years are being atomized into a spectrum that represents the fluid reality of cultural tastes. For those of you familiar with calculus, it’s like the labels’ marketing departments are trying to do integrals by adding up the area of boxes under the curve and the web has just shown up with a graphing calculator.

Yes, Saul Williams isn’t even a blip on most consumers’ radars today, and artists like Trent Reznor, Ghostface Killah, and Robbie Williams, whose management has publicly objected to EMI’s stated aim of cutting the conspicuous excesses for which the record industry is infamous, are still dominating the charts. But at this point, there are more and more Saul Williamses and fewer and fewer Trent Reznors coming up everyday, and so the shift in the balance of power is only a matter of time. While Doug Morris is frantically trying to figure out how not to be the Shmoo (and Rio Caraeff is frantically trying to keep Doug Morris from sounding like a moron), the artists the labels wrote off as not viable in the legacy system are out there pioneering a new system in which they are. Back in the day, Overture decided to ignore small “tail” publishers because the margins sucked and Google decided to instead find a way to make the margins better, which resulted in AdSense and Google ultimately being able to come after Overture’s core “head” publisher business with margins that were that much higher. Christensen calls it the low-end disruption, and it’s an economic force of nature. Like Ian sez:

Environmental forces are easily ignored. Do so at your (or your company’s) peril.

So, what will the music industry of the future look like? I think it will be many more artists individually making less money on average than today, but collectively making a ton more for 2 reasons:

1. The diversity of choice that will be available to consumers means more of them will find more things they enjoy more passionately and engage with more deeply resulting in them being willing to spend more money
2. The decreasing importance of the recorded music revenue stream will spur innovation in exploitation and business models in a way that was impossible with the labels trying to protect their packaged goods cash cow

I firmly believe music will be a profitable business in the future, just not as profitable as it is now (but a hell of a lot more sustainable). If you love making music and you’re good at it and work hard, you’ll be able to make a good living — not an MTV Cribs living, but an upper middle-class living — and your music will touch more people who will identify with it in meaningful ways. If you love making music but don’t want to work as hard or aren’t that great, you’ll still be able to get some recognition and maybe even some money on the side of your day job. And most importantly, if you love listening to music, you’ll have an exponentially wider variety to choose from, a greater chance of finding artists you really like, more opportunities to engage with those artists in myriad new forms, and a real feeling of value from the time, energy, and money you spend. Sounds like a pretty bright future to me.

In case you couldn’t tell, this is an area that really fascinates me and one I will continue to explore on this blog. In the meantime, those interested in following my research in realtime can check out my ‘media 2.0′ del.icio.us stream.

Photo by: nsdesigns via Flickr

[Originally posted on my 360 blog]

First of all, yes people, this blog is not (entirely) dead. I’ve been a bit busy with stuff over the last few months. In many ways, Flickr and Twitter have replaced this blog for cataloging my random acts of self-expression. And while there were a few subjects I felt worthy of real blog posts in that time, and I even started writing up a couple of them, I just haven’t had the time (or, more accurately, the attention span) to see any of them to completion. But today, I found myself writing a blog post sized comment on my friend Ian’s blog for the second time in a week. So, I figured why not leverage some of that energy over here. So, here goes…

Right now it seems that everyone is talking about Apple, and you can’t talk about Apple without talking about Steve Jobs. As a student of business and management, I find Apple since the return of Steve Jobs to be an extremely interesting case study which I’ve followed very closely. And for someone who’s never worked there, I think I’ve been able to glean some relatively deep insights into the company:

• I’ve been an avid Apple customer for the last 17 years, giving me a solid grasp of the history of their consumer product efforts
• The product I work on was originally Mac-only and is now competitive with features in OSX, so I know what it’s like to be an Apple ISV and competitor
• I work with a number of hardcore Apple fan boys (and one ex-employee/fan boy) — no less than 5 members of our team waited in line for the iPhone — so I get to observe first-hand the impact of Apple-mania even though I’m no longer as personally passionate about the company as I once was
• I’ve been able to attend the last 4 Stevenotes (2 MacWorlds, AppleTV special event, and this week’s iPod Touch special event) thanks to another Apple fan boy for whom I work, so I’ve experienced full power and glory of the Cult of Steve.

A little over 2 years ago, I sold the 200 shares of Apple stock I bought back when Jobs returned to be CEO. At $41/share, I made a tidy profit and an $18,000 mistake based on yesterday’s closing price (or, more depressingly, $21,672.35 based on the 52-week high). Why did I sell? Simple, I underestimated Steve Jobs.

I originally invested in Apple because I felt it was undervalued based on the assets that were in plain sight. Contrary to people who thought Apple was on its last legs and about to be steamrolled by the cheaper WinTel ecosystem, I believed strongly that the innovation and quality Steve Jobs brought to computers insured that Apple would lead the growing high-end segment of the home PC market and would be profitable doing so. When the stock started surging on the hype of the iPod, I sold because I felt the market was placing too much value on a non-core product line with unsustainable growth. Boy, was I wrong!

Read more »

[Originally posted on my 360 blog]

As predicted, MySpace users are getting pissed off that the social network they originally chose for its openness is now denying them access to the best of breed services they desire.

There will never again be *one* destination that provides *everything* a user wants and needs. The only way to be ubiquitous is to be completely open and allow users to use your product (whether it be a homepage on which they can embed any service they choose, or a service they can embed in any homepage they choose) how they see fit. Openness is now a viable basis of competition, and you will be undercut by a more open competitor if you are too closed. 

MySpace thinks that they built YouTube, and maybe they did. But, where would MySpace be without all those users embedding and watching YouTube videos on MySpace long before there was a MySpace video player? A smaller piece of the pie can be worth more, if the pie itself is made bigger by allowing distributed innovation to create value for your consumers in ways that you can’t or wouldn’t.