Georgia Wonder. An independent, unsigned British band. Climbs into the Pirate Bay Top 20. Using Frostwire. And Georgia Wonder “met” Frostwire via Twitter.
Twitter. A marketplace. Frostwire. A distribution mechanism. Pirate Bay. Indexers and trackers. Georgia Wonder. Unsigned, independent band. The shape of things to come in the music business? Time for all of us to wonder, not just Georgia.
Update: Georgia Wonder can be found on Twitter via @GeorgiaWonder
Today was an unusual day. I went back to work after work. Now why would I do that? Well, I was invited by Sally Davis, the CEO of BT Wholesale, (and BT’s Disability Champion) to a viewing with a difference: The Art of Disability and Diversity, organised on BT Wholesale premises with the assistance of Gig-Arts.
I’d had a long day: things are fairly hectic right now, and so a part of me wanted to go home straight after work. But I’d said I’d go, so I did. And I was really glad I did. [Thank you, Sally].
Why? Three reasons.
One, the art on display was really good. All of it. I was particularly taken with the works of Esther Appleyard, Alison Lapper, David Downes and Mike Fryer. Mike Fryer’s choice and juxtaposition of colour was arresting; similarly, there was something truly captivating about David Downes’ use of light and shade in his trademark urbanscapes. Alison Lapper, whom I first came across as the subject of Marc Quinn’s Pregnant (exhibited on a plinth in Trafalgar Square) had some stunning works, particularly a large scale Marilyn Munroe-esque portrait of a woman. But to me the highlight of the evening was discovering the works of Esther Appleyard, really brilliant stuff.
Two, the artists were all present; they had the opportunity to address all of us, and they then mingled with the guests all evening. [To be precise, Mike Fryer was not there, he was still in the Ukraine, but his wife and niece were present]. It was fascinating to hear why they did what they did, what each artist’s particular muse and focus was.
Three, the art was affordable, ranging from a few hundred pounds to a few thousand pounds. [Yes, I know that today a few hundred pounds buys you a bank or two, but then you have to worry about your asset being nationalised forthwith and entirely worthless to you. Whereas the artwork on display, albeit national treasures, carries no such risk of forfeiture].
As I said, I was particularly taken with the work of Esther Appleyard. Her work is brave and forthright, taking the issue of genetic screening head-on from the perspective of a disabled person. As in the case of Distance Not Applicable (pictured above) she has a series of works using the initials DNA: Diversity Not Alienation, Discovering New Alphabets, Decadent New Assortments. When talking to us, her message was clear: Are we in the business of screening people like her out? Is she not human like the rest of us?
Alison Lapper, in her comments, carried on where Esther left off: What constitutes “normal”? Is anyone a “normal” human being? If any of us knew a “normal” person, could we introduce Alison to that person?
Genetic testing is a complex subject with even more complex arguments; I am by no means an expert, and won’t pretend to be one. What Esther and Alison have reminded me is that there is more than one perspective on the argument, more than one side to be heard. And I hadn’t really heard the side of the disabled person.
Today I was in the presence of some very talented persons. Very very talented persons.The fact that they were disabled appears, if anything, to have spurred their talent on; talent that was prodigious and on display. Something we should bear in mind in time to come, as debates about the whens and hows of genetic testing evolve further.
A coda: if you’re a captain of industry and you’re reading this blog, you’re probably lost. Maybe you meant to be here instead, despite the parlous state of the markets. On the other hand, if you are a captain of industry, or even if you know someone who is the real deal, check out Gig-Arts. Their model of making the works of disabled artists available for display in boardrooms and corporate offices is worthwhile.
Last week I used an image that had been shorn of attribution by the time I found it, and wanted to find a way to credit the right person. Lars Plougmann, a long-standing reader of this blog, found the source using a tool called Tineye.
Tineye calls itself a reverse image search engine, and is a pretty good service at the beta stage. There have been so many occasions where I had found the image I wanted, but not at the right resolution. Tineye appears to solve this; at worst, it tells you that the resolution you have is the best you’re going to get, so you don’t waste time looking.
I thought it was worth sharing. Not surprisingly, I went off on a tangent while using it, thinking about how similar techniques could be made to exist for audio and video files, and the kind of uses they could be put to.
Views? Thoughts?
In the town where I was born,
Lived a man who sailed to sea,
And he told us of his life,
In the land of submarines,So we sailed on to the sun,
Till we found the sea of green,
And we lived beneath the waves,
In our yellow submarine,We all live in a yellow submarine,
yellow submarine, yellow submarine,
We all live in a yellow submarine,
yellow submarine, yellow submarine.And our friends are all aboard,
Many more of them live next door,
And the band begins to play.
Yellow Submarine (Lennon/McCartney) The Beatles, 1966
Yesterday I spent some time talking about how I viewed Twitter now, having used it for a while. Today I thought I’d follow up with a brief explanation on how Twitter is my Submarine changes the way I treat Twitter.
As my last post details, I view Twitterland as my personal ocean, and Twitter itself as my personal submarine and periscope. Once I understood this, it wasn’t long before I understood a few things:
1. In Twitterland, I am in control of the pollution that enters my personal ocean. I choose the tributaries that make the rivers of information that go into my own ocean. I can turn the tributaries on and off. That made me think of what I would consider polluting habits. Twitterland has many Polluting Habits.
My first change of behaviour, therefore, was to start looking at everything I did in Twitter from the viewpoint of pollution of personal oceans, I wanted to identify the polluting habits.
2. The first one is Industrial Pollution, where my personal ocean gets filled up with other people’s automated tweets, the expulsion of particulate contaminants into my personal water. You know something? I like automated tweets, the way they take human latency out of the process, the way they tend to come error free and context rich. But you know something else? I want to choose whose automated tweets I get; more importantly, I want to choose which particular themes the automated tweets are about. Today I get one person saying “I am here.” “Now I am here.” “Now I have moved and I am here”. A second person is signalling “I’m live, come talk to me” as if they’re some seedy chat line. A third is into “I’m playing this piece of music now”. And this one. And this one. The issue is not the content as much as the frequency of publishing. One day I will have the tools to say “Please turn off tweeter A’s music tweets, tweeter B’s food tweets, tweeter C’s location signalling; they’re all very nice people, they’re my friends, but the reason they’re my friends is that we aren’t alike in all our tastes!”. But until that day arrives, I need to let my friends know that a little tweet sensitivity will go a long way towards helping keep many of our personal oceans clean.
My second change of behaviour was to choose to avoid all automated tweets; instead, I signalled my movement to a higher-tweet-frequency place such as blip.fm or last.fm, and then tweeted the odd sample or two, not the whole session.
3. The next source of pollution was the introduction of Waste Products into my personal ocean. This was where people I followed kept up high levels of shameless self-plugging and personal advertising, making my ocean uncecessarily bigger. I said Hey (Hey) You (You) Get off of My Ocean.
My response was to unfollow the people, in the hope that anything useful they said would be retweeted by someone else. Waste Producers tend to have large numbers of followers, so it’s not difficult to find someone who will filter their waste for you.
4. The final source of pollution was people who Shone Light into My Darkroom. Shining lights is a Good Thing. Except in darkrooms, especially when you’re a photographer. I found that Twitter was not just a place I went to in order to find things out, it was also a place I went to in the hope that there were things I would *not* find out. I expected people who understood about “spoiling” and how to avoid it.
My response was to be very careful about spoilers, to make sure I was considerate to others when tweeting.
And you know something? That about sums it up. Twitter is a collaborative space, where many personal oceans overlap. We have to learn to be considerate to each other in that collaborative space.
There’s another big subject I want to write about, the role of Twitter in Knowledge Management, but that’s not for today. I’m done for today. Views and comments welcome as usual.
[Incidentally, I have not been able to find the person who took the wonderful photograph above, I found it on the web without any accreditation for me to use and thank….help please].
I like Twitter, particularly because of its publish-subscribe nature. A few weeks ago, I described Twitter as:
a newspaper. a bulletin board. a club. an “adda”. a telephone network.
Twitter is all these things. It brings me the news. It is a place where people publish notices. It’s a place where I meet my friends, and where we talk to each other. It is many things to many people. But. And it is a humdinger of a but. It’s a lot more than that.
To me, Twitter is fast becoming my personal submarine and periscope to the ocean of the World Wide Web, the personal areas I want to go to defined by my relationships to people and ideas. It doesn’t mean that I don’t use the rest of the web: Twitter is an adjunct to the web, a very important adjunct, but an adjunct nevertheless. The way I use Twitter teaches me something, something about the way things may be going. Let me explain what I mean.
There are also many things Twitter is not, and these are also important to note.
Ads: I enjoy the fact that it is ad-free; the way I look at it, if it becomes ad-full then someone else will build something that is ad-free. Because one of the reasons I like Twitter is its ad-free-ness. It’s important to me. And I would probably stop using it overnight if that changed.
E-commerce: Twitter is not where I go to in order to buy and sell things. I have the whole of the web for that. Twitter is a personalised place, a private place, a segment of the web where I am in conversation with my friends. No place for multi-level-marketing, no place for people to Makoff with my money (assuming, of course, that the past tense of Makoff is Madoff).
Stories: the Web is the library where my stories are located, stories cast in video and audio and text. Twitter is the catalogue for my personal interests, defined in two ways: my personal profiles and preferences, along with the ambient influences of my friends and associates. I was particularly taken with the description of Twitter in Clay Spinuzzi’s blog recently, where he spoke about Twitter as a means of assessing ambient status. I had the opportunity of meeting Clay in Austin over the summer (we take our summer vacation every year in Austin, I love that city); he is a very clever man with some real insights into the way human networks work.
Twitter is not a replacement for the web, nor will it ever be. Its publish-subscribe nature helps us have capillary conversations, (aso written about here and here) and this is very important. The tweet, the @friend message and the DM replicate human conversation more realistically than many prior forms of communication, that and the pub-sub nature gives its capillarity. The ability to compress context via snurls and bit.lys and tinyurls is not intrinsically part of Twitter, but I see it more used in Twitter than anywhere else. The asymmetric follow helps us improve our capacity to sense ambient status, which also helps us in many ways.
When you come down to it, a social network offers you six things.
Early telephones came with directories, gave you opportunities to group and classify, let you communicate. Event scheduling and ambient status sharing were absent, as was the ability to share information about change.
The ability to connect directories with scheduling became available in early office productivity environments like PROFS or CEO, and reached critical mass with Microsoft Office, Outlook and Exchange.
Ambient status sharing became possible when “chat” and IM became popular, and Bloomberg, ostensibly accidentally, saw the value of connecting communities with chat facilities.
We had to wait till Facebook came along before someone saw the value of alerting the community to changes in each of these areas: joining or leaving the directory; forming or re-forming relationships and groupings; adding or subtracting ways of communicating; signalling attendance or non-attendance at events and meetings; sharing status. So the News Feed came along.
Twitter is a news feed, but with a difference. With many differences. Which is why I think of it as a submarine with a periscope.
And I think one of the most important things about Twitter is its size. There are 140 good reasons to like Twitter. Which makes it a submarine, fast, fleet, agile.
