Category: Four pillars

The Sandi Thom story has taken a number of twists and turns. For those of you who didn’t see it first time round, here’s what I posted.

Looked like a classic internet basement-artist-made-good story. And I even mentioned her in other more recent posts, including the last one on Ian Anderson.

Then I saw the comment from Adrian du Plessis, which I reproduce below in its entirety. Thanks for the heads-up, Adrian, even if my stance makes no sense to you….

Start of comment:

Adrian Says:
April 13th, 2006 at 12:57 am e

I know we’ve all wished the Sandi Thom story was a sign of new thinking in the music biz, but, it just doesn’t like that way:

http://www.coolfer.com/blog/archives/2006/04/suckers_thom_st_1.php

http://chartreuse.wordpress.com/2006/04/10/sandi-thom-vs-chuck-d-or-welcome-to-the-death-of-hype/

http://www.velvetrope.com/ubbthreads/showflat.php?Cat=&Board=UBB1&Number=770385&page=3&view=collapsed&sb=5&o=2&fpart=1

still, we can build the revolution ( :

End of comment

So I went around the sites and followed the threads and did my next bit of due diligence. [The first bit of due diligence was to follow the story from the web to her site, to listen to the music, to read more about her and then to blog the story].

And it’s interesting. Here’s my summary: [For those of you who want to see what was on the chartreuse blog, click here]

• There is evidence she signed a publishing contract last year with Windswept/Pacific Music Publishing, who are not small.
• But this is not a recording contract, just a publishing one.
• There is evidence that she signed a contract with Sony only after the live webcasts. This is a recording contract.
• There is evidence she did the webcasts. Alexa says the traffic did not show. But that means nothing to me.
• There is evidence she has talent. At least to me there is.
• So maybe I’ve been conned. And maybe a good PR firm managed to break into slashdotland and start the rumours. And maybe she’s as real as Milli Vanilli.
• But from what I can see everything remains consistent. None so blind as those who will not see? No, I just like seeing good in people.

And so I am going to do the Ernest Hemingway thing and trust Sandi for now.

As he said “The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them“

An aside:

There’s an intriguing dog-that-did-not-bark angle here. One of the comments I read said something like “How come 2 million people tuned in and there wasn’t a single mention on a blog?”

There are many inaccuracies but the point remains valid. The figures I have seen in MSM say 200,000 not 2 million, and worldwide at that. slashdot is not exactly miles away from the blogosphere, so there was activity there. And if there was a big PR agency involved all the way, surely they could have set up a technorati tag for Sandi and for that matter a wikipedia entry as well.

So I still go back to: I think she’s real, and that the story is real, and that people are reacting to smart PR guys “corrupting” a real internet story. Alexa and Windswept are not enough for me to stop smiling. But fewer teeth are showing now, that’s for sure.

If I am interested in learning, I am interested in being wrong and shown to be wrong. Goes with the territory. So maybe I will be proven wrong on this one. But I will learn.

Andrew McAfee, a professor at Harvard, makes some interesting points in a recent post to his blog.

In a telling, almost depressing coda to the post, Andrew says:

“I’ll end this post with an anecdote that showed me that these three trends* are not yet well understood by many business leaders.  Last week I was teaching in an executive education program for senior executives – owners and presidents of companies.  I assigned a case I wrote about the internal use of blogs at a bank, and also gave one additional bit of homework:  I pointed the participants to blogger and typepad, and told them to start their own blogs and report the blog’s URL to me.

What they reported instead was that they had no intention of completing the assignment.  They told me how busy they were, and how they had no time and no inclination to mess around with blogs (whatever they were).  Out of two classes of 50-60 participants each, I got fewer than 15 total blog URLs.

Trying to turn lemons into lemonade in class, I asked some of the people who actually had sent a URL to describe the experience of starting a blog.  They all shrugged and said it was no big deal, took about five minutes total, didn’t require any skills, etc.  I then asked why I would give busy executives such a silly, trivial assignment.  In both classes one smart student piped up to say “To show us exactly how trivial it was.”  At that point, class discussion became interesting.

[My emphases]

*The three “broad and converging trends” he refers to are:

• Simple, free platforms for self-expression
• Emergent structures rather than imposed ones
• Order from chaos

Having spent time with Andrew, I know there’s a great deal of value in what he has to say. I’d strongly recommend reading his blog.

No, not the 1966 Antonioni movie (which I was young enough to enjoy illicitly in 1970) but its Brooklyn remake by Vinnie.

It didn’t matter that it was late at night in Chennai, that I had a very early morning flight, and that the broadband connection I has was less than perfect, that it took many attempts to finish watching the show. And what a show.
I just loved everything about Vinnie’s efforts. And it encapsulated a number of lessons for me, an all-too-brief definition of what is possible.

How individuals working in teams can do things never done before. Learn about the possibilities. Take risks yet be careful. Tell people about what they want to do with passion and voice and then have the joy of actually doing what they want. Sample bits of this and that without caring about rights or wrongs, not intending to make money out of the sampling per se. Doing no evil. But doing something different. Disruptive in a gapingvoid way. Engaging. Micro capital raising. Co-creating. Sharing.

Having fun. [Thanks to Gordon and Frank for the link.]

A coda. Could you imagine doing this with anything but a Mac? The idea, the fund-raise, making the video, the lot. It’s all Mac.

Us Tareyton smokers would rather fight than switch.

And you read your Emily Dickinson

And I my Robert Frost

And we note our place with bookmarkers

That measure what we’ve lost… Simon and Garfunkel, The Dangling Conversation

The more I think about it, the more I realise what incredible changes there are in value creation when we co-create and trade and exchange across open marketplaces.

Now I can see exactly where people I like and trust “note [their] place with bookmarkers”.

Now the bookmarkers don’t have to measure what is lost. [Except, of course, the evils sprung up by bad law and bad IPR and bad DRM].

They measure, at least in some part, what is gained. If tags are bookmarkers and things like Technorati are measures. But that’s for another day.

Today I decided to spend some time with Joi Ito’s blog. Not just read it, spend time on it. And it was an exhilarating ride.
First, I experienced the Chicken Little approach to transparency, a story Joi repeats from a meeting he was at. Priceless.

Second, via Joi’s post about Wikia, I decided to take a wander around the Wikia sites that were forming. Here’s a list of some popular Wikia sites:

1. Alternative History, for creating fictional alternative histories.
2. Creatures, about Creatures, the artificial life computer game series
3. d20 NPC, generic NPC and monster stat blocks for the d20 System.
4. Dofus, information on the Dofus MMORPG.
5. Doom, for fans of the Doom series of computer games
6. Memory Alpha, a Star Trek encyclopedia
7. Muppet, based on the Muppet franchise, including Sesame Street, Fraggle Rock
8. Star Wars, about the Star Wars movies and spin-offs
9. Uncyclopedia, a parody of Wikipedia
10. WikiFur, information on furry community and culture

Tells you something about the way cyberspace is interacting with the real world, doesn’t it? Fictional alternative histories. Muppets and Star Wars and Star Trek. And various forms of MMOG. And, just to “legitimise” the list a la Christopher Locke’s organic gardening*, we have “information on furry community and culture”. [*More on this another day]

Third, while on the subject of real versus virtual, but staying with Joi Ito, I then saw a Philip Torrone story about credit cards and virtual environments and the Lindex exchange.

Wow.

I have already seen stories about “well-to-do” “youth” “outsourcing” the playing of the first few “vanilla” levels of games to “India“, only to take up the reins when a more interesting phase of the game is entered and the requisite number of lives and collateral and artifacts have been earned/collected. Co-creation of a different sort. For well-to-do and youth and outsourcing and vanilla and India please go ahead and substitute with whatever works for you…..the principle’s the same and it’s here to stay.
We should not underestimate the sheer joy and power and learning and creativity that comes from collaborative work using social software in a world of sharply declining computing, communications and storage costs.

Thanks Joi for a wonderful random walk. By the way, it’s what I do with people I link to. It is worth actually taking a walk and visiting the site every now and then, rather than just getting syndicated and alerted content.

……….Yes we speak of things that matter. With words that must be said……………..

While working on the implications of better tagging and better learning (as part of syndication and search) I recently visited Rashmi Sinha’s site (as recommended by Chris Messina whom I found via Tara Hunt who was RageBoyed my way). Very interesting post on collaborative filtering and tags, something that everyone interested in that space should read. IMO anyway.

I particularly like the point being made about user-generated content being the key, the trigger. I quote from Rashmi:

But I think I do finally understand why collaborative filtering is being dragged out of closets, dusted and prettied up in this new world of tags, Web 2.0 and Long Tail. One of the roadblocks to collaborative filtering is user input, some expression of interest by a user that you can hook into. Tags provide such a hook. On the other hand, tags desperately need good ways of supporting findability. As I argued before, you can go only so far with lists. Which is why we are seeing interests in clusters, facets and collaborative filtering. Additionally, both tags and collaborative filtering provide inroads into the Long Tail.

I’m going to spend some time thinking about what she’s written, it takes some digesting. But I cannot help but feel this is important in the context of Four Pillars. Where collaborative filtering meets tags is where I can see the Bond Driver and the Learn Driver begin to do different things. [For those who have not read my earlier posts, this is a reference to the Nohria and Lawrence Four Driver model]