Author: JP

The moving finger writes ….

The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.

Omar Khayyam

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Remember those lines? Did you ever wonder what it would feel like to have a moving finger that writes?

And today I know how it feels. Because today I bought Dan Bricklin’s Note Taker.

A delightful and slightly obsessive-compulsive little application, letting you take simple notes quickly and efficiently on to your iPhone. No mess, no fuss.

And, unlike Omar Khayyam’s Moving Finger, this one can be lured back To cancel half A Line. There’s an erase function.

Easy to use, easy to share what you write. Dan, well done. [Disclaimer: I know Dan and count him amongst my friends.]

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Not enough joy

An old colleague, Andrew Yeomans, reminded me of this recent piece in Gizmodo, looking at digital music revenues for punk-pop band Too Much Joy.

Reflections on an industry screaming of incumbent inertia, lackadaisical about their figures and the meaning of those figures.

Lackadaisical where it hurts: in the income streams that trickle towards the artists. You know, the creative people.

The figures speak for themselves.

Thinking about food and music and climate change

I think about food. A lot. In fact I’m perennially hungry, have been that way ever since I can remember. So it should come as no surprise that every now and then, I try and view things from the perspective of food.

Take music for example. Recorded music. Music that has been bottled or canned or preserved.

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The ability to preserve music in this form is fairly recent in human history. And without this ability, the whole argument about downloads and ripping and  format transformation rights and I don’t know what else falls by the wayside.

So when I look at this diagram, and read this report, I begin to wonder. Incidentally, there’s a worthwhile series of posts on the subject here and here, dealing, for example, with the winner-takes-all bias in some of this.

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I know how I feel about preserved food. About preservatives in food. About additives and e-numbers and what-have-you. I know how I insist on using fresh herbs and spices when I cook, even though it takes longer and it’s more expensive.  I know how I dislike frozen food, how much I dislike frozen food. I will not knowingly eat something that has been microwaved if I can avoid it. These things I know.

There was a time when there was no such thing as frozen food. In the history of food the ability to freeze food and reheat later is fairly recent.

There is a cost to freezing and transporting and heating frozen food. That cost will soon become more apparent to people, as awareness of carbon footprint in the food transportation and processing business grows. And more people will start eating local produce again.

And maybe we’re going to see something similar about music and film and sport. If this whole DRM and downloads and intellectual property rights debate continues to get out of hand, criminalising entire generations and seeking to corrupt and destroy the value of the internet, then we’re going to see a revolution.

We will see a renaissance of live music, of live performances, of live sport. Local teams supported. Local farmers supported. Local playwrights and poets and authors supported.

We will see a renaissance of travelling bands, of authors and poets on roadshows reading their own works.

We will see a renaissance of people paying to see artists perform, rather than paying for the right to perhaps maybe one day hear something recorded, canned and preserved, something they have to climb DRM Everest to hear, and even then it may not be possible.

DRMers and dreamers. Which one are you?

Hauling bits around

I’ve probably known Bob Frankston for far too long. Actually I don’t think that’s possible; along with Dan Bricklin, he has been a fantastic foil, sounding board and mentor over the years. My trips to Boston would not be the same without my meetings with the two of them.

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This particular post, however, is heavily influenced by discussions I’ve had with Bob, who is the only man I know completely capable of interrupting himself, and doing so with panache and flair.

Of late I’ve been having some interesting experiences with Twitter, particularly in the context of being able to acquire things remotely and getting them sent to me.

First off, some weeks ago, I was trying to source a hard-to-get CD. I have this strange fondness for Canadian folk/rock, the consequence of growing up at a time (early 1970s) and a place (Calcutta) when Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, Gordon Lightfoot, Leonard Cohen and The Band were part of every respectable music listener’s staple diet.

With that sort of upbringing, when I read about a new star on the horizon, Taylor Mitchell, I planned to listen to her. After hearing a couple of songs on her MySpace site, I tried to buy her album, but it was not available online anywhere. Then I found out, only a few days later, that she’d died, in very tragic circumstances.[Please do consider contributing to her memorial fund, which you can do here.]

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Now I was even more determined to acquire her CD and listen to it, my own way of paying homage to her undoubted talent. But I was in Windsor, UK and the only shops that sold it were in College St in Toronto. So I tweeted it. Were any of my Twitter friends in Toronto that day? Were they prepared to do me a big favour and sacrifice time and effort to get me the CD?

Yes. Unbelievable, but it happened. Someone I only knew via Twitter, a New York resident, was in Toronto that day, saw my tweet, went to the shop, bought the last copy. And managed to get it to someone else who worked 100 yards from me in London.

More recently, some weeks ago, I was thinking and praying about my godson Noah. I was going to see him just before Christmas, and I wanted to get him something special. I’d already spoken to his mother, and I knew that he was in a creative Lego mood. But which kit? And what could I do to make it memorable and different?

The answer came serendipitously. I was scheduled to have dinner with Cory Doctorow and his wife Alice, and I was idly catching up on his Boing Boing writings while waiting for them at Saf last week. [Excellent company, excellent restaurant]. And then I saw this:

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So I read the story. And I knew I’d found the perfect present. But could I get it anywhere online? Nope. Only available bricks and mortar in Japan.

I tried for a few days, and then yesterday I tweeted my need. Anyone in Japan right now and likely to get back to the UK before 17th December and willing to acquire the Muji-LEGO mashup? Answer came there one. And wonderfully, magically, the present is now winging its way to me.

These are just instances. What really matters is the emerging business models. how people are innovating in this space. Over the last fortnight or so I’ve learnt about a couple of examples:

Lug-it, a cloud-based physical haulage system: “a P2P package delivery system on top of your extended social network”

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SendSocial, which promises to let you “send anything, anywhere, without an address”.

logoWhich brings me all the way back to Bob Frankston and the reason for this post. Bob’s always drilled into my head the concept that the addresses and numbers we use should never be considered routing; instead, I should consider such things to be nothing more than hints, clues as to the best way to get something to someone. Reading about SendSocial reminded me about his dicta, with their focus on getting things from person to person without an address.

Similarly, seeing what the people at lug-it were doing also filled me with glee. There was something so tellingly small-world-experiment about it, something intrinsically valuable about social networks and their P2P characteristics.

So now I have cause to think. About what this means for social networks. About what this means for digital communications.

And I have cause to celebrate. About the beauty and simplicity of the ideas that are blossoming in this space. Lug-it, SendSocial, I hope you succeed.

Numbers of Mass Distraction

2009 Is Record Year For UK Singles Sales
Innovation boosts record label income as licensing and rights deals generate £195m in 2008
New business models boost income for British record labels: licensing and multiple rights deals net £122m in 2007
New BPI Stats show strength of digital music

Just some of the headlines from a group of people not known for their progressive thinking when it comes to music and downloads and filesharing.

But let’s not look at the headlines. Let’s look at the facts:

2009 has already become the biggest ever year for UK singles with more than 117m sold to date, recorded music body the BPI today announced.

“Sales of single tracks in 2009 have now surpassed the previous all-time record of 115.1m, set in 2008. The total of 117m has been reached with 10 weeks of trading, including the vital Christmas period, still to run in 2009.

“That singles have hit these heights while there are still more than a billion illegal downloads every year in the UK is testimony to the quality of releases this year and the vibrancy of the UK download market.  Consumers are responding to the value and innovation offered by the legal services and these new figures show how the market could explode if Government acts to tackle illegal peer-to-peer filesharing.”

“The UK Top 40 is now almost entirely comprised of digital singles. During this year, 98.6% of all singles have been retailed in digital formats.   More than 389.2m single track downloads have now been sold in the UK since the launch of the first mainstream online stores in 2004.

All from that well-known friend of illegal downloaders and filesharers, BPI. I have to consider the statements to be largely factual since they have no incentive to report these particular numbers falsely.

It’s not just about digital sales either. The Beatles are reported to have sold 2.25 million albums in two weeks recently. Again, data with some backing.

I like numbers. But not when they’re Numbers of Mass Distraction (NMD). Not when 136 people can become 7 million people.

Why should I care what numbers are bandied about in the press? Why should I care when someone says “Only 1 in 20 downloads in the UK is legal” or words to that effect?

Well, maybe the excerpt from Wikipedia on WMD will give you some idea why:

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When “tentative” numbers get repeated often enough, even if they get corrected later, people tend to remember the original “tentatives”. That’s what the research shows. And by the way, when I refer to numbers or research, I try and refer to the source openly and transparently.

The ITU projects the total number of broadband connections in the UK to be 18.4m by the end of this year. Let’s take that number for a start.

BPI then says that there are already a minimum of 117m legal downloads this year, with 20% of the year to go. Without even going for seasonal adjustment to allow for Christmas, let’s take a worst-case legal download total for 2009 to be 150m or thereabouts.

If we then take the Mandelson pronouncement that only one in 20 downloads is legal, that would assume that 2009 will see 3 billion downloads in the UK. There’s been a similar pronouncement that we have 7 million illegal downloaders in the UK, which was the previous NMD or Number of Mass Distraction.

So let’s try and see whether these numbers look sane, smell right. 3 billion downloads represents 163 downloads per broadband connection per year, or one illegal download every two and a quarter days. Do you know anyone who buys a single every other day? Would you believe it if you were told there were people who did that?

Hang on a second. Why should I use the 18.4 million ITU overall broadband lines in the UK number? What happens if I use the 7 million NMD number? Now I have to believe that there are seven million people in the UK who download 429 singles each illegally every year, or 1.17 every day.

The 117m figure is solid. There is money to show for it. Till receipts.

The 18.4 million is solid. There is money to show for it. Telco billing records.

The 3 billion figure is an estimate based on digits (of the finger kind) whirling through the atmosphere.

The 7 million figure is an estimate based on conversations with 136 people.

If the 7 million figure is correct, then it means that nearly two in five people with broadband in the UK are illegal downloaders. People in the UK reading this post will know other people in the UK with broadband connections. Does this seem reasonable?

If the 7 million figure is wrong, do you think it is wrong on the low side or the high side? Imagine what that does to the daily illegal downloads that 40% of your friends now have to achieve as a NMD target.

I tend to think that maybe, just maybe, the 7 million number is a tad on the high side.

So now let’s move to the other number, 3 billion. If we assume 61.4m people in the UK (Source: National Statistics Online) then we’re talking about one illegal download every week or so for every single person in this country. Does that feel reasonable to you?

Let’s say the number of illegal downloads is not 20 times the number of legal downloads. Would you think the right number is higher or lower?

I tend to think that maybe, just maybe, the 20 times number is a tad on the high side.

Numbers can be so distracting. But let me not paint a gloomy picture. Taking the statements of the BPI alone and the events of the past year or so:

  • There is evidence that the number of legal downloads sold is sharply on the increase.
  • There is evidence that new business models are emerging, from iTunes through to OneBox, from last.fm through to spotify and we7.
  • There is evidence that people in the UK care about their digital futures.

KeepOnTruckin'

My thanks to Robert Crumb for not copyrighting this image in 1968.