Last week I got a request from Dr. Kay Beck, asking me to sit in on a panel at the Digital Arts Entertainment Lab’s Symposium at Georgia State. If Kay asks you for something, the answers is Yes. So yesterday I found myself sitting on a stage at Georgia State with Jim “the face of corporate America” Distefano, Mark Wynns and Chad Eikoff, talking about how content creators might best navigate the choppy digital waters.

It’s been a while since I’ve done any public speaking, Turner kindly asked me to decline a number of invitations during my tenure there, and this was a great chance to get back in the game.

It was a small group in a very large auditorium and the following list outlines some of the things I learned while listening to other speakers or just chatting with folks:
- meta-tagging is a actionable legal issue, for which your new venture could be dragged into court to defend your use of certian trademarked meta tags. I had no clue.
- keyword advertising could also be something that requires legal representation if one wants to avoid litigation.
- i speak to fast, quote random papers no one has ever read and ramble on!

Like I said it was lots of fun.

I spotted this on the Ad Land blog under the caption ” ‘ah, that’s subtle’ award of the day.” Its an ad for the Manix condom brand, which is sold in Europe. It took me a while to figure it out and when I did I was disappointed. Then again I spent at least 5 minutes trying to figure out the ad and another 10 talking about it so maybe its been successful.

Is this cryptic to anyone else or is it just me?

There are some folks, Andrew Keen comes to mind, who are easy to dismiss not because of the sensational and contrarian nature of their ideas but because of the lack of thought and discussion that surrounds them. Contrast this with Kevin Kelly who wrote 1,000 True Fans back in March and ignited the the echo chamber we lovingly call the Blogosphere with his suggestion that with a 1,000 true fans supporting them an artist could live exclusively from their craft.

The idea is not without its detractors, Jaron Lanier of Digital Moaism fame (summerized back in ‘06), being the most prominent. However, unlike Andrew Keen who goes into Fox News styled apoplectic fits (more) when there is disagreement, Kevin Kelly has opened his blog to highlight the arguments against his meme. In posts last week and again today, Kelly has highlighted variations of and arguments against his meme. While remaining steadfastly committed to the idea of a 1,000 (or perhaps 5,000) true fans, Kelly is has taken up the challenge of proving his ideas right. He is on a quest to find 3 artist that make a “predictable income sufficient to raise a child.” If he cant, then the 1,000 true fans meme will be declared officially dead and Jaron Lanier, Andrew Keen and the terrorist will have won.

Hip Hop veteran and habitual scowler, Harry Allen, has an “exclusive” video of literary sensation Margaret B. Jones on YouTube, she discuss her upbring on the mean streets of LA and her new book Love and Consequences. The video is excellent as it is one of the few were we get to see Margaret Seltzer in full ghetto mode, using authentic street slang straight from BAP’s and Colors. The book can still be purchased at amazon and carries the description below, made all the more funny by the controversy surrounding the book: A stunning memoir of a mixed-race girl growing up in gang-ridden South Central Los Angeles, where she followed her foster brothers into the Bloods before she hit puberty: what she witnessed, how she survived, and-against all odds-thrived.

Last week the RIAA was cheering the destruction of million CD and DVD taken from flea market vendors and church swap meets across the country. This week it put out the numbers of CD’s shipped from its client record labels to music stores and they arent good. The ailing music industry shipped 17.5% fewer CD’s to record stores in ‘07 than it did in ‘06. Of course, much of what was shipped to the stores is still sitting in discount bins so the actual sales decline is surely much worse. Across all physical formats, CD singles (up 50%),  Cassettes (down 41%), LP’s (up 36%) etc… shipments were down 16.9% Y/Y.

Despite this news, record labels still seem intent are keen on destroying any company, site or individual foolish enough to build a service that makes online music discovery and playback simple and painless. The four major labels, though nine of their subsidiary companies, have filed suit against Project Playlist, a site that aggregates music from around the web into one simple interface. According to the label’s, Playlist.com enables “massive copyright infringement” by pointing to files on other websites (ie blogs, artist pages, fan pages etc…). Despite common sense and the generally accepted business maxim that your customer can not be your enemy, the luddites at the major labels seem to relish finding novel ways to destroy shareholder value and drive customers away.

I’m not the sharpest tack in the marble box but if I wwas an exec in a failing $10 billion industry that had shrunk by more then $2 billion in the last year with shipments down 19%, the last thing I’d do is sue a company that lets my customers discover and buy my product. Call me crazy.

Over the last few weeks I havent taken the time to put mention any of the research reports I pilfer from various and sundry sources. That ends today. Here are a few of the more interesting reports I’ve read in the last couple of weeks as I boned up for different client assignments.

Actually, the first one by the UN Conference on Trade and Development is a tome that I’ve started but havent been able to finish entitled Creative Economy Report 2008 (pdf here). Its a 357 page report from the UN on the state and policy needs of creative Industries. The report is filled with enough juicy tidbits and statistical goodness to satisfy the most voracious information consumers. It provide details on cities where creative industries thrive, how many people they employ, the amount of money they generate and the major issues facing them. The report is pretty dense and I have only scratched the surface but the main point is that creative industries are a critically important part of an evolving globalized world. Then I got to page 44 and gave up . I an SOS out to the good folks on the Pho List asking for help and commentary on the report, hopefully, net veteran and future Phd, David Touve will sum it up fully for us.

I found this report, Interference at the EPA (pdf here), from the Union of Concerned Scientist to be rather interesting. It appears that more then 60% of the scientist at the EPA say that they have had the administration mess with their work, 22% claim the administration has been selective or incomplete in the use of data to justify a specific agenda and 7% say the administration has directed them to exclude or alter data from technical documents. Apparently the White House’s Office of Management and Budget, headed by administration bag man Jim Nussel, is directly responsible for much of the skulduggery going on at the EPA. Based on survey info the report is 108 pages long and a fairly quick read. Makes me wonder about the value of that organic label on the foods I buy.

Have you ever wondered why popcorn cost so much in theaters? well USC prof and general movie buff RIchard Gil has. He, along with Wesley Hartmann, wrote the paper “Why Does Popcorn Cost So Much At The Movies?” (pdf here) and despite the fun title its a dry academic treaty on metered pricing, demand functions and consumer preferences. Using complex multiple-regressions, which I didnt try to figure out, they concluded that given the two ways theaters make money (admissions and concessions) charging a premium for Popcorn allows the theaters to keep admission prices low enough to attract an audience. The duo found that as movie attendance increased the average amount spent on concessions went down. They also found that hardcore movie goers buy more popcorn, on average, then regular movie goers. All of this leads me to believe that raising prices is the last thing a theater should be doing at this point. They might also want to consider which segment of the population they really need to be targeting. If this report is right the last thing you’d want for your business is more teens buying less popcorn.

Apple’s ubiquitous iPod was built to ensure that listeners could not easily pass their music between devices. The iPod and iTunes combination leads to a very solitary musical experience with users only able to share music by jumping through technical hoops. The annoyance factor with sharing digital music was intentionally high. However, where ever there are digital roadblocks, there is an entrepreneur ready to remove them (for a small fee).

Enter MiShare, a nifty little device that came out late last year and allows users to transfer music, pictures, videos and even playlist between iPods. DRM infected music is transfered but must be reauthorized for use on the receiving iPod. But since your reading this blog you know that the vast majority of music on any given iPod is ripped or downloaded MP3’s and so we can assume that music reauthorization wont be much of an issue. The cool little device got good reviews from the NYTimes and the Chicago Tribune. Itis available from the Mishare site for $99.95.

Last year marketers and many web pundits were buzzing about the potential of Second Life to change everything from education to brand development. Much ink was spilled on the transformative value of 3-D avatars and millions to be made within the Second Life ecosystem. Alas, the buzz didnt last and Second Life receded into relative obscurity (only 500K active users), behind Twitter, Facebook and an onslaught of Web 2.0 services.

In an effort to revive their dwindling fortunes the company has hired digital prognosticator Mark Kingdon to be its new CEO. Mark is a former Pwc consultant who most recently headed up the interactive agency, Organic. Mark will bring a wealth of ad industry relationships and marketing knowledge to the engineering focused company. Does this mean that Second Life will become yet another purveyor of ad network solutions for marketers? Lets hope not.

Yesterday I got an email from Michael Robertson of MP3tunes, personally asking me for help (yeah were that close). You see, MP3tunes is being sued by EMI music for making it easy for people to store and access legally purchased music online. The labels are arguing that ripping a CD and uploading it for storage is tantamount to distributing it and is therefore illegal. Rebuffed by the courts in March, EMI is undetered and Michael says the labels efforts to sue his company out of existence is causing him major agita. Michael doesnt want me to write my congressperson or file an amicus brief on his behalf, what he really wants from me is Money. In the letter, apparently sent at random to conencted to the Interwebs, Michael has two request: 1) people upgrade their free MP3tunes accounts to the premium level. 2) blog about his plight. I’ve held a premium account for close to two years (Michael you need a better database marketing system) and I’ve now blogged about it so I consider my obligation fulfilled. Full email from Michael after the jump.

From: MP3tunes
Subject: Personal Message From MP3tunes CEO
Date: 4/22/2008 4:05 PM

Dear MP3tunes Customer,

Let me start by saying that as the CEO of MP3tunes I appreciate your support over the last few years. Your suggestions and patience have helped us build the Locker system we have today. We just launched AutoSync that makes managing your music collection easier than ever.

As you may be aware, the major record label EMI has sued MP3tunes, claiming our service is illegal. You can read about the case here. Much is at stake — if you don’t have the right to store your own music online then you won’t have the right to store ebooks, videos and other digital products as well. The notion of ownership in the 21st century will evaporate. The idea of ownership is important to me and I want to make sure I have that right and my kids do too.

I would like to ask for your assistance in our battle for personal music ownership. We need your help because we are a small, 15-person company battling an international giant. They would like to make us spend all of our money paying legal bills. Here’s what you can do to help:

1) Please upgrade to a Premium account. This week MP3tunes is launching 3 service levels. I hope you will consider signing up for one of the paid levels. This will not only help us pay for the costs of our service (machines, storage and bandwidth) but a portion will go to cover our legal costs in our case with EMI.

2) If you have a chance to talk publicly about our cause on your blog, with friends, reporters or even EMI personnel please do so. MP3tunes is working hard to design a secure personal music service. We don’t promote sharing of music in any manner. We want people to legally acquire their music. But once they do, we think it’s important that you be able to use it how you want for your personal use. The AmazonMP3 store says: “You may copy, store, transfer and burn the Digital Content only for your personal, non-commercial, entertainment use.” and this is what MP3tunes allows you to do.

You have my commitment that I’ll continually battle for your right to store your music online and listen to it anywhere on any device. I hope you’ll consider helping MP3tunes in our battle. Thanks.

– Michael Robertson
CEO
MP3tunes.com

There has been a ton of talk about Bubble 2.0, it started with Fred Wilson back in March of ‘05, was picked up by Vulture Central in Oct of the same year and has since since spawned everything from an official blog to a Wikipedia entry. However, the only sure sign that Bubble 2.0 is in full effect is the recent launch of 5 major web sites focused on the Black audience. The last time this many copy-cat Black sites, with major backers, launched was at the tail end of the dotcom boom in late ‘99 and 2000.

Back then a series of lackluster online efforts launched and failed in rapid succession. These sites were generally the brainchild of a disgruntled black executive in a traditional media firm who had snagged a white funding source. He (its always a he) would then hire a bunch of magazine writers, movie/music promotions people, traditional ad-sales folks and some witless MBA’s for legitimacy. What none of these sites had was a real problem to solve, a raison d’etre that was unique to their target audience, or a technological basis to solve that problem.

So how do todays crop of Black sites compare? Have they discovered some unique problem facing the Black community that can be solved using the Internet? Do they offer some new technology or an innovative use of an old technology to leap-frog current offerings and add real value to their users? Lets look at them one at a time and you can decide for yourself.

“The Root is a daily online magazine that provides thought-provoking commentary on today’s news from a variety of black perspectives.”

The Washington Post has been toying with the idea of launching a Black news site since Retha Hill was running Digital Ink. Somehow Skip Gates convinced them to revive his failed site, Africana.com which was pawned off to AOL Blackvoices back in ‘05, under the name The Root. TheRoot.com features many of the same writers (Jimi Isreal, Veronica Chambers, Marc Hill etc…) waxing poetic over the same issues that made Africana.com such a snoozefest. While theRoot.com does have a certain cool Huffington Post vibe to it, with intelligent often witty writing, there is nothing innovative, new or unique about the offering. theRoot.com is exactly what you would expect if Jet magazine was magically transported into the the modern era and launched a site.

“OnOne is the premiere social network of Radio One, Inc. The connecting force between our established communities which include Giant Magazine , Radio One Network, as well as our newly launching The Urban Daily, and News One“

Ok, it’s 2008 and Radio One has finally gotten serious about the Internet. Of course it’s new found Internet lust comes at a time when its core radio businesses isnt doing well and its TV efforts are rudderless. Enter Smokey Fountain, selling a story of Black people desperate for news and entertainment content online and presto, NewsOne is born. The site is essentially an AP feed, poorly filtered for “Black relevant” content, with sprinklings of music reviews and entertainment news from Giant magazine.

But wait there’s more. To the collective gaffaw of most web watchers, Radio One purchased Blackplanet.com and its sister sites Migente and Asian Ave for $38 million. Black Planet peaked back in ‘03 when it was immortalized by Kanye West in “Get em high” and is now one of the many also-ran social networking sites largely forgotten by the press and users able to get dates without computer mediation. While the acquisition may be profitable in the long term for Radio One (it was only $38 million) it shows just how backwards looking the management is. The hodgepodge of sites being built by a team of magazine and radio executives (why isnt Omar running this thing?) doesnt bode well for Mr. Liggins’ dream of a Googlesque empire to replace the dwindling revenues from his Radio business. On the plus side, if you have an ailing media property, like Giant Magazine or Black Planet, Alfred’s in an acquisitive mood and he’s got millions to spend.

“RushmoreDrive is where the Black community goes to find the best search results.”

Of all the recent launches IAC’s inexplicably named, Rushmore Drive, is the one with the highest ambition and most interesting concept. Rushmore Drive is billed as a vertical search engine targeting Black users who have trouble figuring out Google.

Although the concept is at least interesting, a quick comparison of Rushmore Drive and Google shows very little utility. Searches on the “black focused” Rushmore Drive and Google return essentially the same information. Type “best employers” in Rushmore Drive and one might expect to get a list of employers that excel at African-american recruitment or perhaps the BE list of top employers for African-americans. Unfortunately, that doesnt happen. Of the top 5 search results for “best employers” on Rushmore Drive one is for the best employers for people over 50, another is for people in Canada, people in Asia and people in New Zealand. None of which is particularly relevant to African-americans looking for the best employers and definitely no better then the results on Google. IAC spent several months putting this offering together together and had a huge boondoggle last week in NYC to celebrate the launch, to bad they didnt spend more time on the ontology of their search engine.

“Global Grind is the place for you to explore multimedia that matters to you. Discover new content, collect your favorites, share them with the world, and discuss them with the community.”

Launched back in late 2007 as an unusable mess no one cared about, Global Grind has evolved into a slightly better mess that no one cares about. The site, which is backed by Accel Partners and Russell Simons, was originally supposed to be a universal startpage for Hip Hop fans. It has become a cross between Digg and PopUrls, where the best parts each site are left out and the whole thing is overlaid with a bad design and Hip Hop slang. Fashizle!

As a heavy user of PopUrls (and less frequently Reddit), I kinda get the idea behind the site but I hate the execution. For those interested in whats buzzing around the web, Popurls aggregates important information from a select group of sources, in one place. It reduces the signal-to-noise ratio to a useable level and thus performs a service. On the other hand, Global Grind, with a random selection of content sources from Yahoo News and MSNBC to TMZ and F-Listed, does not offer the same level of service or utility. The site attempts to throw everything but the kitchen sink on a series of poorly designed pages, which only confuses and frustrates a long time web users like me. Why have the venerable Larry Hester listed as content curator if he clearly isnt curating any content? Why call it a universal Hip Hop startpage if there is no Hip Hop on the homepage? Heck why bother with the site at all?

Way, way way back in 1995 Malcolm CasSelle and E. David Ellington convinced the good folks at AOL that there was a market for a Black focused content offering. With money from AOL’s greenhouse and ideas from New York Online, they launched NetNoir and the “Urban” internet gold rush was born. What followed was a series of poorly conceived and terribly executed copy-cat sites designed to solve a non-existent problem; the lack of content and communication outlets for African-americans online. Volume.com, Hookt.com, 360hiphop.com, UBO.com, Urbanentertainment.com and many other members of the Black dotcom deadpool should serve as reminders that unless you’re solving a problem for users then the utility and longevity of your site is limited. Lets see how long it takes this latest crop of sites to figure it out.

This week Ad Age published an interesting article on the growth of Internet ad spending in the UK. Despite shrinking ad budgets across other sectors, the article reports that online ad budgets grew 38% to $5.6 billion in 2007. They are expected to add another 30% this year for total ad budgets around $7.28 billion. UK advertisers spend some $8 billion on TV ads and at the current pace online ad spending will exceed this number in early in ‘09. The other noteworthy item in the article was how very short-sighted some people in the ad industry remain. Despite the witting on the wall, Bob Wootton, pr flack for the ad industry in the UK, uttered the following quotable:

“Internet is thriving because it’s the refuge of small and medium-sized enterprises in hard times. It empowers and enables a new kind of advertiser to come to market… There is no surge of big brand advertisers towards the internet.”

In other words, real advertisers with real budgets arent moving their money online so we dont need to be concerned with small businesses spending their meager pennies on keywords. Classic luddite mistake #518, thinking scale is the only measure of importance.

Back in October of 2006 I joined Prosper as a lender, thinking it would be a great way to get a good return while doing some social good. In January of 2007 I started lending money on Kiva where the sole focus is on the social good created by these loans. At the time I wondered if I would ever see any money come back from the Kiva.org loans and what kind of interest rate I’d eek out on Prosper.com. Half way through the social lending horse race, the results are trickling in and they are rather surprising.

Kiva.org loans have no interest attached and have to be repaid in 14- 20 months, Prosper loans must be repaid in 36 months and are interest bearing, so this isnt exactly an Apples to Apples comparison. But of the 3 loans I’ve made on Kiva, to poor people in Togo without out credit scores or verifiable employment, the repayment rate is 100%.

Prosper on the other hand is a bit of a mixed bag. Of the 19 current loans I have on the system, 15 are current and 4 are in some level of distress. Three of this are more then 3 months late and are likely never to be repaid. Whats really interesting is that of the 3 delinquent loans on Prosper one is an A rated (720 - 759 FICO score) burrower and the other is AA rated (760+ fico score). According to prospers calculations I’m making roughly 19% on my loans through the site, but I’m not so sure. Of the $1,200 I’ve lent (in $50 -$100 dollar increments) I’ve netted roughly $45 in interest, which is roughly 3.6% in 18 months. While thats better then many US savings accounts its not a particularly high return relative to the risk and alternatives. I dont even get the warm and fuzzies for doing some social good, since noone ever updates their profiles after the loan closes.

While I love the idea of social lending sites like Zopa and Prosper, they lack the strong social bonds that make micro-finance projects like Kiva work. Without the social bonds the rate of repayment will be pretty low. Since most of the value that comes out of P2P sites is social and not financial, I’ll be increasing the number of loans I make on Kiva and probably decreasing my loans on Prosper.

One of the better bit torrent sites, sans all the naughty bits, Demonoid is back online after a long dark stint.

South Park creators, Trey Parker and Matt Stone, have done what no other content creators have been able to do online, until now. They launched a site where fans of South Park can legally watch every episode of the show, so long as they are in the US. International fans will have to wait a few months, according the the press release put out earlier today by Comedy Central.

What’s really amazing about this, besides the great content, is that Trey and Matt (we are that close) were able to get all the complex legal and business model issues worked out with Viacom and put the show online. No other content creator has even come close to getting their full catalouge on the web, especially not for content that remains current and popular. Of course fans can watch any content they want online using various web and P2P sites, but this is the first time creators have launched a site that really competes with the free alternatives.

I hate using canned quotes but this one, direct from the press release, is on the money:

When asked about the launch of the new site, Stone and Parker said, “We got really sick of having to download our own show illegally all the time so we gave ourselves a legal alternative.”

To date, the web’s premier, and only, source of full length episodes of South Park has been AllSP.com, which mysteriously went dark earlier this week. A message posted on the site says

The administrator for AllSP.com did not respond to numerous emails but I’m going to go ahead and assume that the reason they are down is because some savvy lawyers over at Comedy Central got in touch with AllSP.com’s host and started causing trouble. Be sure to check out the similarities between AllSP.com and SouthParkStudios.com, it cant be a coincidence.