D-Trekkers, the start-up I am involved in, is on the look-out for a part-time marketer (online and offline) / admistrative assistant to join our small team.

In a nutshell, the project is a social enterprise, non-profit venture seeking to improve public transport planning and usability for people with disabilities and access needs. We aim to do this by providing a wiki/social network/forum where users can update information about the disability/access provision of train stations/coach stations etc via PCs, laptops, tablets and mobile in real time - which is then easily searchable by those with the same needs who are planning journeys.

The real point of the site is that the community will be providing information for each other (in a similar vein to Wikipedia or Last.fm). Those planning public transport journeys with disabilities and/or access needs will no-longer have to place any of their faith in similar services with governmental or business bias - which are updated infrequently, and tend to not be the most trustworthy sources of information.

The site is already being built, with a beta launch set for the next few months.

The candidate can work remotely - though located in or around London might be best, as the project's founder and developers are in Brighton and I'm in Falmouth. Obviously, an interest in marketing for a charity/non-profit and how the internet can be used to make a difference to the real world (via wikis, social media, mobile etc) is a massive bonus.

If you're interested, contact me on: lukewrite at gmail.com or 07805811983 or leave a comment.

Luke's John Peel Day Mix

I have prepared the above Spotify playlist to commemorate the day which has come to be known internationally as John Peel Day. It pleases me that this dedicated 24 hours seems to gain increasing notability every year, what with numerous gigs nationwide, as well as plenty of activity online – so here’s me contributing in my own small way.

I was a big Peel fan, particularly between the years of 2000 and 2003 when I sought to listen to all his weekly shows until I moved to a room down a Penryn valley with no radio reception. Since his death in 2004 I have spent many hours scouring the internet for downloadable shows and sessions, but this list certainly reflects the turn of the millennium more than any other period – and I still listen to most of these artists and their offshoots as much now (and often more) than I did then.

Melt-Banana – Free The Bee: Noise melting Peel favourites from Japan who recorded a number of sessions and were included in The Festive Fifty a good few times. My introduction to them came post-Peel, but I’m well aware that their introduction to UK audiences was largely down to him – and this track, taken from Teeny Shiny, became a set staple.

The Quadrajets – All My Rowdy Friends Are Dead: A Peel introduction to me. In early 2003 I won a competition to watch The Immortal Lee County Killers do a session at Maida Vale.  The Quadrajets were the earlier band of lead singer, Chet Weise, and I remember Peel blasting them out of the speakers while ILCK set up and we drunk beers. ILCK ruled, and afterwards, Peel being the perfect gentlemen, offered me and my girlfriend a lift to where we were staying. I’ll never forgive myself for declining the offer, but it wasn’t necessary at all. Nor did it seem necessary to ask for an autograph or a photo or any of that usual stuff you do when you meet your hero. And on reflection, I think that’s kind of cool.

The Mountain Goats – Family Happiness: I remember Peel playing this (it must have been 2000) and being compelled to try out this new thing, Napster, to see if I could find the track on there. I did, waited for about two hours for it to download, and my love affair with The Mountain Goats is still strong today.

Pavement – ...And Carrot Rope: Again, I remember Peel playing this and talking to my friends about Pavement at school the following day. Shortly afterwards I bought Terror Twilight then Brighten The Corners then Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain and then... Pavement split up.

The Fall – Industrial Estate (Peel Session 15/6/78): Seeing as The Fall did, pretty much, a Peel session a year, I’m sure I caught a few as they were aired. I won’t state the obvious to say the Rough Trade box-set compiling all of them is fantastic – and this is taken from that.

The Wedding Present – Crushed: Although The Wedding Present are playing all over the world these days, at the turn of the millennium they were on something of a hiatus and lead singer,  David Gedge (who makes a great appearance on John Peel’s This Is Your Life episode), was in Cinerama. Still, it was at around this time that my best friend played me Bizarro and I came to learn about the world according to Gedge – thus making the connection with Cinerama, this band which Peel played as if it was some religious duty.

The 90 Day Men – From One Prima Donna To Another: Another Peel introduction which led me to hunt down The 90 Day Men on Napster. I regret not seeing them when they played in Exeter all those years ago – and something tells me they aren’t the kind of band to reunite.

Half Man Half Biscuit – Irk The Purists: A Peel favourite and a track with a message to live by. I remember thinking they had about the stupidest name I’d ever heard, which made me instantly curious.

Baby Dee – When I Get Home: My introduction to Baby Dee was sort of indirectly through Peel. The Mountain Goats covered this song during a session in 2002 or 2003 – and I’ve come to love both versions.

Venetian Snares – Dollmaker: Of course, Peel was a big champion of underground electronic music including those who make up the rosters of Planet Mu and Warp. Venetian Snares was no exception, and although it no doubt went over my head at the time, I came to love Venetian Snares post-Peel and love it when he crops up when going back over torrents of old shows.

Aphex Twin – Come To Daddy (Pappy Mix): My favourite Aphex/Peel memory is when the two met for an interview at Cornwall’s Gwennap Pit for the Channel 4 show Sounds of the Suburbs. I remember unearthing the Cornwall episode in UCF’s video library when I was a student and its brilliant to see Peel walking around all these places on my doorstep talking about music, sound, poetry, art and how weird we are down here. I like to think he’d have the same response were he able to visit again.

Lightning Bolt – 13 Monsters: More noise-making from this duo who Peel invited for a session after they played ATP. I believe I missed the session because I was living in that reception-less Penryn valley at the time.

The Bug – The Director: Although Peel was a fan of The Bug, it was his producer who introduced me to him/them when up visiting for the Immortal Lee County Killers session.

Tarwater – Miracle Electric @ John Peel Session: Obligatory German electronica (side-project of To Rococo Rot) who I’ve come to be quite obsessed with recently (and they’ve just had a new record out).

Butthole Surfers – Edgar: My favourite band. Butthole Surfers did two Peel sessions and a rough early version of this (titled EDG) appeared during one of them. It’s also worth reading Peel’s review of an early Buttholes show in the book The Olivetti Chronicles. (It basically sounds like the best gig ever.)

Nocturnal Emissions – Fons: A recent discovery for me. I read an interview with Nocturnal’s Nigel Ayres in which he talks about Peel’s influence on him during the early 80s – and basically hearing punk, reggae, industrial, metal etc all in one place. Listening to the Nocturnal Emissions stuff that followed, it’s no wonder Peel came to champion him too.

Ivor Cutler – Pass The Ball Jim (for John Peel): A great little dedication to Peel and his love of football.

Lightnin’ Hopkins – You’re Gonna Miss Me: Included because of the obsession with blues which was occurring during the time I listened to Peel most (what with the explosion of The White Stripes et al.). Peel was keen to remind us of where it all started, though, and this Lightnin’ lament on loss seemed pretty damn apt.

 

It didn’t take very long for social and mobile media to become linked with the riots which affected cities across England in early August. Now, as a steady stream of Facebook users are being arrested, charged and jailed for inciting riotous behaviour via the world’s biggest social network, it seems likely that we will continue to be reminded of the negative side of emerging technologies for a while yet. 

It’s no wonder that it will be traditional mass media sources which will be doing the reminding. Whether we sympathise with, or harbour hatred towards, those who are now facing the full force of the law, articles and stories reporting on a phenomena which is hard to police and incredibly powerful in the hands of those who are clever enough to use it are chock full of just enough rebellion and fear to get the majority of news consumers clicking links, buying newspapers and tuning into 24 hour news.

If there is one truth I know about news it is this: a story which is positive and without friction (Aaron Biber opening his barbershop for the first time after the riots for example) will receive fewer readers than a story which proclaims that we are going through the end times and BBM might be a cause. In economic terms, the latter article is considered a ‘hit’ while the former is a ‘niche’ – and if we were to chart every riot news story since August 6^th, the left hand side head of the graph would be full of the most-read stories of fear and burning buildings, whilst the more positive articles like that of the online campaign which helped get Aaron Biber back into business (in three days!) would reside somewhere down the tail of the graph. This is the Long Tail of news.

Luckily for us, the architecture of the internet and tools like Google make it pretty easy for the average news consumer such as you or me to find the news they need to find. I can happily report that after a little time sifting through the stuff beyond what made the front page of The Daily Telegraph or the headlines on BBC News 24 paints a different – indeed, more positive – story of how social and mobile media affected the country during August 2011.

I’m talking about more than just @Riotcleanup here (though I don’t dispute that this clever use of Twitter was deserving of the press it received), there was a seemingly limitless number of web news stories, features and blog posts pointing me towards other fantastic examples of social media and emerging mobile/internet technologies working to help affected communities (DeLoot London and DeLooter’s Mobile, somethingniceforashraf.tumblr.com, Yoga For Hackney, Save Siva’s Shop are good examples).

Thank goodness for having access to the Long Tail of internet news, then. After all, we’d have a pretty distorted view of social media’s affect on England over the past few weeks without it. I shudder at the thought of a world where we could only read hit news stories. Now I’m shuddering even more at the notion of how dire my music taste would be were I only able to listen to BBC Radio 1. It doesn’t bear thinking about. But there is a serious question I want to raise here...

Would we have got Aaron cutting hair again, or raised money for Ashraf, or saved Siva’s shop etc as successfully and efficiently without the internet, social networks and mobile media?

Short answer: No.

Longer answer: Although it seems like action more often reserved for bigger humanitarian disasters, it’s fair to assume that the BBC and Sky might have placed permanent 0800 DONATE-NOW numbers above Fiona Armstrong’s or Dermot Murnaghan’s respective heads.  Perhaps if Rebekah Brookes was still in Fleet Street she’d have The News of The World field some donations too – alongside a helpful name ‘n’ shame campaign, no doubt. But we didn’t see any of this (well I didn’t, did I miss it?) because – let’s face it – even if they had wanted to, this can all be done online. And better.

When I say better, I really mean more quickly, efficiently, directly and transparently. In his book, The Long Tail, Chris Anderson highlights three forces which make a long tail economy: 1. Democratized production, 2. Democratized distribution, 3. Connection of supply and demand.  All three of these are evident in the Long Tail of news (we can substitute ‘sales’ for ‘reads’) and all three of these are evident in the Long Tail of post-riot community action (we can substitute ‘sales’ for donations – monetary or otherwise).

	Force	...in business	...in news	...after the riots
1.	Democratize production	Digital videocameras, desktop music and video editing software, blogging tools	Laptops, mobile phones, videocameras, Google Maps	Laptops, mobile phones, videocameras, Google Maps
2.	Democratize distribution	Amazon, eBay, iTunes, Netflix	News and non-news Websites, News and non-news blogs, microblogs, YouTube, Google Maps	Websites, blogs (esp. Tumblr, Blogger) microblogs, YouTube, Vimeo, Google Maps
3.	Connect supply and demand	Google, blogs, Rhapsody recommendations, and best-seller lists	Google, Google News, blogs, microblogs, RSS	Google, Google News, blogs, microblogs, RSS

With this in mind, we can, at best, imagine how difficult it would have been to have achieved anything like what was achieved after these riots and, at worst, contemplate how ineffective and flawed such actions might have been in an era without democratized production/distribution and super-connected supply and demand (i.e. without the internet, social networks and mobile media). For instance:

·         Those making donations would have had little to no control as to where their money actually went.  Their donations would go through one of few large channels, and then be disseminated via the organization in the middle. Now, those making the donations get to make the important decisions of who receives their help. And if there’s no channel in place, they can make one.

·         The process of moving lots of money through minimal channels would have taken more time – perhaps weeks and months to reach those who need it. Today, many channels of fewer amounts of money seemed to get to those who needed it within days.

·         The process would not have been as transparent. Blogs allow those who’ve made donations to be updated regularly. Those receiving donations were also able to communicate directly with the communities who had come together to help them.

It might seem reductive to discuss a complex cluster of social movements in light of a theory of economics. I accept that a lot of good things which came from these actions were not related to money and were more to do with harder-to-quantify benefits such as community solidarity and re-establishing grassroots order during an ugly overwhelming state of chaos.

I also acknowledge that traditional mass media no doubt had a part to play. After all, with Long Tail economics there will always be a head of the graph and it is likely that the instances which were very successful, such as @Riotcleanup, will have been because of the combined efforts of traditional and new media. However, I wanted to explore the notion that social networks, mobile media and the internet may be more important and valuable in England now than ever before. And it’s fair to say that at this moment in time, this is something our traditional mass media institutions are not really trying to explore.

As shoppers, many of us have been used to shopping in a Long Tail marketplace of Amazon and Google etc for a number of years. The recent riots highlighted to me that the news marketplace – with the web in its current state of evolution – is something of a young Long Tail market, where an increasing number of consumers including myself are looking beyond the BBC and the broadsheets for news which has more worth to them. Anderson discusses the very beginnings of this briefly in his book, but the importance of the Long Tail of news has never seemed so stark as now – when the biggest news providers are forced to be reflexive.

Additionally, we have also seen this past month that when it comes to community action after a rare and devastating occurrence, the true vibrancy and worth of empowered niche groups can come alive – whether that’s by adopting economic traits to raise capital, or sharing information that’s not being widely published. Before the democratization of tools and distribution, before the Long Tail of the internet, before social networks and mobile media, this couldn’t have happened so effectively – and we would have had even less knowledge of it happening than we do today.

-

Further information:

The Long Tail by Chris Anderson

Institutions vs. Collaboration by Clay Shirky

“Absolute explosion” — How BlackBerry BBM fed the riots, says contact by Mike Butcher

Image credit: Global Post

It's been a busy few months as I have been off touring with the band.  I have, however, managed to get some interesting work done in between, so here are a few links.

 

I have been writing some statistics orientated posts for Econsultancy:

South Korea and Malaysia show impressive digital growth

and

How Europeans are ‘media meshing’ with mobile internet

 

I have also written about photo sharing and social media amalgamation over at the GoTripod Blog.

 

Additionally, I was also invited to assist and discuss network art at the Electronic Village Gallery in Liskeard Last month - a really interesting project.

Have been busy in the garden over the past few months, hence the lack of blogging.  But I'm all set to get back in the flow now.  So here's a garden update in pictorial form.

Happy new year!  I doubt I’m the only one of us who, as a year passes into another, can’t help but focus on how things have changed, are changing and may change over the next 12 months.  I for one am eager to crack on with 2011, and to experience what might emerge in writing, digital and music.

This post is certainly partly influenced by the new year.  In addition, it has also been spurred on by a new project I’m involved with and the minor hurdle of giving it some kind of name.  You multichannel fans will know that this is perhaps a more difficult task now than it ever has been – after all, it has to be something which can work in the context of URLs, as a spoken word, across social media channels and elsewhere (and, preferably, it can’t be taken already). 

We settled for something in the end and it stopped bugging me for a short while.  That is, at least until I sat down to watch the latest gift from my LoveFilm subscription, David Cronenberg’s Videodrome, which got me thinking about names all over again. 

In short, the film deals with the blurring of the real world and the fictional world of television.  This is a big problem for protagonist Max Renn.  However, it is the character Professor Brian O’Blivion who is of interest to us.  Without heading into spoiler territory, this is a man who only exists via the medium of videotape and TV screen – even when being interviewed.  And when being interviewed he tends to reply with such philosophical and prophetic responses as the following: “O’Blivion is not the name I was born with, it’s my television name.  Soon all of us will have special names, names designed to cause the cathode ray to resonate.”

Although O’Blivion’s prediction of the future was not entirely true in terms of television, if we replace the idea of the cathode ray with any of the number of screens we see each day it is fair to say that our usernames are often the first port-of-call for others yet to know us.  Of course start-ups and new projects must have names which resonate, but how about our personal profiles?  Are we giving ourselves ‘special names’?  Are they resonating?

Recent internet advancements certainly suggest so.  As more and more of us sign up to social networks (although, not sites such as Facebook where your real name will do just fine) there is undoubtedly a trend away from nineties-style usernames such as ‘johnsmith82’ and forum-specific handles like ‘ilovemymazda’ because usernames need to connote much more and often must be suitable for a range of audiences – including anyone from business colleagues, potential clients, friends of friends, or family members etc.

That’s a lot to ask of just a handful of letters, but many individuals manage to achieve this with their usernames (including big stars such as Ashton ‘@aplusk’ Kutcher or Russell ‘@rustyrockets’ Brand).  Perhaps the biggest clue that this is a phenomenon of the digital or ‘post-digital’ age in transition is evident when we look at – for example - Twitter usernames of those who work for large well-established companies.  These (too) often consist of the employees’ name prefixed or suffixed with that of the brand.  Like ‘johnsmith82’ and ‘ilovemymazda’ such names certainly do not resonate – at least not in the way O’Blivion and myself think they should.

So why do I think usernames should resonate?  This interests me because I believe the digital arena must be as transparent as possible, and when we represent ourselves within it we should relish the opportunity to show off all aspects of our character.  In fact, it is my belief that the more unique and multi-faceted our online personas are, the more visible we are and the better, stronger, more valuable the connections we make with each other.  This can start with a username which is not generic, but instead resonates you.

In another twist of ‘the increasing importance of screen-names’ narrative, there is also the curious way in which our online names can become assimilated into real life and in turn become part of our character (which, frighteningly, is not a million miles away from O’Blivion’s absurd decision in Videodrome to communicate solely via TV screen).  More frequently I’m meeting people in real life whom I have conversed with online and who, as if to break the ice, ask: ‘Are you myyada?’ – referring to my quickly-chosen-at-the-time Twitter username taken from the Flamin’ Groovies song: My Yada. 

Although, I don’t believe ‘myyada’ resonates particularly (not compared to ‘O’Blivion’ anyway!), on reflection it is one I’m quite happy to hear in the context of a crowded room or meeting.  Even if others don’t get the reference, nor understand the meaning of ‘my yada’, at least it is not influenced by a business or a particular medium, neither is it overly whimsical.  And, for now, it says something about me – and is all mine.

Last month I was lucky enough to be invited by ThinkLAB UK to take part in their first Cornwall-based discussion: The Reality of Freemium.  It was an informative session and covered many aspects of ‘freemium’ as a business model across channels, and for a region which is arguably quite removed from the UK’s digital centre it was positive to find there were a number of Cornwall based individuals and businesses looking to embrace growing digital strategies.

Using success stories such as Dropbox and Spotify as a starting point, you can see via the link above that we covered a lot of ground in the session.  Yet, one aspect which we knew deserved further discussion came with the notion of ‘shady freemium’, as introduced by Tom Telford of 3 White Hats – hence this post.

In simple terms, we at first decided that examples of ‘shady freemium’ were said to occur when businesses succeeded in getting customers to sign up, but without being entirely transparent as to what aspects of the product would only be accessible once they had started paying.  We also considered businesses who had been known to spontaneously change costs and introduce charges (or altering how they themselves make money, e.g. introducing more adverts) as erring on the shadier side of freemium – as opposed to good wholesome straightforward ‘clear freemium’. 

For those with an interest in SEO, the possibility that freemium examples may come about with varying degrees of transparency is probably not entirely surprising.  Search engine optimisation practices are often referred to as white hat, grey hat and black hat depending on the quality of the work in the eyes of Google etc  and like any online trend, there are always likely to be examples of good and bad practice – and those which sit in-between.

While it seems difficult to orchestrate a shady freemium business model that is likely to be as frowned-upon as an SEO campaign full of black hat techniques, there is no doubt plenty of scope for potentially frustrating (and at worse, losing) customers by introducing sudden changes or asking them to pay for something unexpectedly.  And, indeed, there are real life instances where the above has happened often due to unforeseen business pressures, and sometimes occurring after significant company changes.  But there are certainly ways where changes – which may be unavoidable – can be handled well, and actions which may be seen to have fallen into the shady freemium park can be made clear once more.

Music-orientated services have been at the forefront of the freemium movement, so it is little surprise that one company I will decide to mention by name is part of that industry.  Bandcamp is a great service for musicians to host their music and to make it as easy as possible for their fans to buy/download songs.  After signing up, users get a majority of Bandcamp goodies for free, i.e. they can upload music, artwork and start selling, but bonuses such as extra download codes come at a small cost.

Long time users (myself included) will have noticed a change in the service in August and if – like me – they hadn’t read the FAQ particularly closely and are of a more optimistic disposition, they may have been surprised that Bandcamp were now going to take 15% of each sale made (in addition to around 3% taken by Paypal).  On the surface, this looked like quite a risky move – after all, by providing this great service and not taking a cut until now Bandcamp had framed itself as a kind of super-philanthropic alternative to Murdoch’s Myspace and other corporate networks such as Facebook and Last.fm where advertising and making ‘friends’ would always take precedence over the music.  Could taking a cut signal a priority shift from music to business?

I expect you would have to be pretty pessimistic to think so.  Yet, as a user, this move did seem a little shady to me.  After uploading all of my band’s releases to the service and taking time to price each competitively – as well as singing its praises to nearly every musician I knew – I was then faced with having to re-price with both Bandcamp’s and Paypal’s cut in mind.  For a £5 ‘product’, that could mean we wouldn’t see nearly £1 of what the customer paid.  And what about bands with more than five members?  It didn’t seem right that each performer would get less of a percentage than Bandcamp.

So did I and other users hit the messageboards in protest, or worse, delete our accounts?  Of course not.  And did Bandcamp tell us to take it or leave it, and carry on as if nothing had happened?  No way!  Instead they pointed users in the direction of their blog, reiterated that their great service will improve with the increase in funds and welcomed constructive criticism of their plans.  Consequently, the comments they did receive brimmed with enthusiasm, positivity and acceptance of the changes.  And since then, they have been seen to tweak the plans after suggestions from their fans.

One initial takeaway from this is that as more companies use freemium business models we are likely to see an increase in the occasions that services may need to be changed in a way some customers may view as a little shady – whether that’s a new revenue stream, an increase in ads, or anything which could potentially make the service or product less fantastic than it was in the first place.  Bandcamp have the benefit of a really great service with few if any very similar competitors, but they knew they couldn’t rely on this fact alone – and used their blog and social media to be as transparent and communicative about the changes as they possibly could.  I believe it could certainly benefit any potential freemium adopter to consider the difference between ‘clear’ and ‘shady’ – and to aim to be as transparent as possible from the outset to ensure they stay out of the latter territory.

Picture source: Fast Company

I did this post for gotripod as part of a competition JUMP are running. 

All entries appear on the JUMP blog, but it was kindly syndicated on Econsultancy too.