buisness

I’ve been invited by Mike Shatzkin to join a panel at BookExpo Amercia the details of which are as follows:

Digital Debut Tool Time
An insider’s presentation of new and soon-to-be-mainstreamed web-based entities providing innovative digital services and tools to authors, publishers and readers.

Moderator: Mike Shatzkin – Founder & CEO, Idea Logical Co, Inc
Presenters:
Peter Clifton – President & Ceo, FiledBy, Inc.
Mark Coker – founder & CEO, Smashwords, Inc.
Hugh McGuire – co-founder, BookOven
Neil Jones – founder, Cooler Reader

You can catch us pontificating between 9:30AM and10:30AM on Friday morning, May 29, 2009 at the Jacob Javitz Centre in New York City.

Here is Media Hacks #7, about where the bucks are or aren’t in online advertising.

This episode, an intimate trio performs for your pleasure: C.C. Chapman, Mitch Joel and me.

LISTEN HERE: Media Hacks: Episode 6.

Or: Mp3 download.

This is a pretty extraordinary article from Bloomberg, nominally about the hot new music site/service, Spotify (not available in Canada or the US yet).

What was striking: the execs from the music business, including Michael Nash, Warner’s SVP Digital Strategy and Business Development, finally cottoned on that the real challenge of the music business is not to fight a lost battle against P2P, but rather to find ways to make it easier for listeners to listen to their music. Check this quote:

“These types of social media are highly competitive with illegal file-sharing,” said Michael Nash, Warner’s executive vice president of digital strategy and business development.

Sites such as Spotify allow users to access the music for free rather than searching for it on BitTorrent and downloading it illegally, Mulligan said. Spotify and the Comes With Music mobile-phone music service by Nokia Oyj, the world’s biggest handset maker, “are the two strongest tools that people have to drive a genuine alternative to piracy,” he said. [more...]

That is, the music business has finally understood that suing listeners who want to listen to their music isn’t a very sensible long-term business strategy. The better strategy is to figure out how to provide more music to those people.

P2P isn’t going away, and the music business’ success will depend on doing a better job of serving their customers than Pirate Bay does.

John Chambers, CEO of CISCO on what the future holds, from MITWorld. He thinks we are about to see the most fundamental change in businesses and government that we’ve ever seen, moving from command and control to collaboration and teamwork.

Media Hacks #4: a conversation about the economy, advertising, newspapers, books and where the money might be, with C.C. Chapman, Chris Brogan, Chris Penn, Mitch Joel and me.

LISTEN HERE: Media Hacks: Episode 4

With all the talk of newspapers shutting down, I wonder if we might flip the traditional interpretation:

Maybe the problem is not so much online news sources killing off business for print newspapers; maybe the problem is the continued existence of print newspapers is stifling innovation in the online news space.

Since so much (local) advertising dollars are still going (being wasted?) on dying print news outlets, there isn’t enough left over to properly fund a leaner, profitable online alternative.

If print newspapers are gone, then local advertisers are going to start wondering how to get people to come to their stores; radio/TV, OK, but if the eyeballs are online, and there are no more papers distracting the advertisers, then …well there is an untapped market there for the online news sites to figure out. And since online can do a better job (in theory) of matching ads/marketing to reader preference, thru cookies, browsing habits, tracking sales (Facebook Beacon notwithstanding), then the death of the traditional news business might be exactly what it takes to kick the online news business, and online content, to real innovation, and real profitability.

My write-up of Tools of Change for Publishing Conference, over at the Book Oven Blog:

I’m back from TOC and still mulling over the problems, and maybe some solutions to problems in the publishing business. There are lots, but a fundamental problem seems to be that most publishing houses have never had much to do with their readers. Their clients, traditionally, have been book stores. And outsourcing relationships with the people who are your reason for existence is a bad idea.

If you look at the talk around the perilous state of the publishing business, and the challenges of ebooks and DRM and digital and the web, it ends up being this old sad story of: “How do we maintain our financial viability when fewer people are reading?” And not, “What do readers want and how can we best provide it?” [more...]

Allentrepreneur has just posted an interview with moi:

Allentrepreneur: Welcome to Allentrepreneur Hugh and thanks for taking the time to talk. You’ve got quite a start-up resume to your name. LibriVox.org, earideas.com, datalibre.ca and your latest one, The Book Oven, which has me particularly curious since I’m a book junkie. Could you give us an introduction?

Hugh: The book business is going through massive changes, there are cutbacks all over the place in publishing houses, bricks and mortar booksellers are in trouble, and there’s angst everywhere about how digital and ebooks will upset business models that have been entrenched for 100 years. But books are still a $50 billion business, and there are passionate readers and writers all over the world. The book business looks a lot like the music business did 10 years ago, with these huge companies knowing things are going to change, but having great trouble adjusting.

One really exciting thing is new technologies that make publishing a book cheap and easy: print-on-demand and ebooks. In some sense these technologies can take the publisher out of the picture – in the same way that musicians can now make and distribute their music online, writers now have the same abilities.

But making a book is an arduous and collaborative process. Book Oven will help bridge the gap between writing, and publishing a finished product. [more...]

From Michael Geist:

The federal government has announced plans to spend over $10 million to establish a “Corridor for Advancing Canadian Digital Media” from Stratford to Kitchener. Coming on the heels of the Nortel bankruptcy, this initiative reinforces the tech shift westward from Ottawa to Waterloo. While tech leadership once resided with Nortel, JDS, Corel, Newbridge, and Cognos, the shift to RIM, Open Text, etc. has a direct effect on the location of future tech iniatives in Canada.

[x-posted at Book Oven & Huffpo]

As the death watch continues for the publishing business and perhaps even the book itself, a group of writers, technologists, publishers, agents, designers, booksellers, and social architects convened in London for BookCamp, a one-day thinking session (bookish experimentation) about what the future of the written word might be.

The event was organized by Jeremy Ettinghausen, digital publisher at Penguin UK; James Bridle, of BookTwo, and Bookkake; and Russel Davies.

Thinking about books

If the amount of thought and enthusiasm generated that day — and evening — is any indication, I think we’re going to be OK. The book is alive and well, even if defining “book” is becoming more complicated; and the publishing business, bracing itself for the biggest shake-up since the paperback, will come out the other end, transformed certainly, but alive nonetheless. That’s my projection anyway.

An open slate

If you’ve never been to a “camp” or “unconference,” you should find the next one near you, show up and dive in. These un/conferences vary from place to place and event to event, but tend to share a few characteristics: they are free, they are open, and the sessions are not formally presented by the organizers, but rather decided by participants. Everyone is supposed to contribute. The result is that you get a much wider mix of people and perspectives than at industry conferences.

BookCamp London started with a blank grid: 6 timeslots and 5 spaces (or 5 spaces, 6 timeslots?), with participants asked to fill in the grid, adding sessions they’d like to discuss. (For some reason I didn’t write anything in. First time I’ve ducked that responsibility at a camp.)

The sessions

Sessions included (paraphrasing titles): Talking to Terrified Writers about the Web, the Book as Social Object/What Happens When Books Are Free?, EBook Gadgets, Is the Web Making Writing More Oral?, Social Networks and the Book, Encouraging Kids to Read. And more.

Fellow-BookOvener Suw Charman-Anderson lead a session about the Book as Social Object; or, What happens when all books are free? The group struggled with this difficult question: what happens if writers can no longer make their money from just selling books? The answer wasn’t so clear, but several things are certain: ebooks are coming; DRM won’t stop infinite reproduction on the web; no one likes DRM; and no one really knows how the business is going to work in a decade. But music, for all the worries about the industry at the corporate level, is thriving. How will writing evolve?

The next session I attended was Bookkake: How to Start a Publishing Company in Your Bedroom. James Bridle,Bookkake founder & BookTwo writer, has published new editions of five public domain titles, using ebooks, print-on-demand, and covers designed from photos on Flickr. An inspiring view of indie publishing’s future.

Michael Bhaskar of Pan Macmillan hosted a session on the web and the increasing orality of text, how text is taking on characteristics that we once associated with oral communications: quick feedback, ephemeral, linear, disposable ; Mark Johnson and Kate Hyde of HarperCollins (and Authonomy and BookArmy) lead a discussion of social networks and the book, that the successes and challenges they’ve had with their initiatives.

Speaking of books ….

In addition to enjoying talking with these smart people, I had great conversations with too many more to list, but some particularly good ones with Peter Collinridge of Apt Studio, Anthony Topping, of lit agents Greene & Heaton, Lucy Crichton, Alex Ingram, digital buyer at UK bookseller Waterstones, Naomi Alderman, and Adrian Hon. It was also nice to see some familiar faces, Aaron Straup Cope of Flickr, and Matt Biddulph of Dopplr, as well as Cory Doctorow, who I’ve crossed paths with numerous times online, but never met in person.

It was a great event, and I am very happy I decided to make the trip to the UK. Well worth it, and a real encouragement that what we’re up to at the Book Oven, behind the curtain, is on the right track. My only complaint was that it lasted one day, and not a week.

Can you see the future?

While there are nerves about the future of the book business, the overwhelming sensation I had leaving bookcamp was optimism. What else could be the result of spending a full day with so many bright people, excited about books, and actively shaping their future?

For some other thoughts on bookcamp (I’ll try to keep this up to date, as I see links) see:

• PenguinBlog
• Chocolate and Vodka: here, here and here.
• The Rosemoirs
• Going Underground’s Blog

[Photos by: Matt Biddulph, Annie Mole, and Russell Davies]

[X-posted at Huffpo & Book Oven]

Question: What would happen if, tomorrow, every publisher, and every book store, went out of business? What would you do?

The Big Stores

About fifteen years ago I walked into my first of the new breed of big book stores, Chapters in Toronto. I thought to myself: how can the book business support such a huge store? How can book selling pay for all this real estate? How can there be so many books?

At first I was encouraged by these stores. The choice of titles seemed endless. They were comfortable, well-designed. There was attention to detail. The coffee-shops were a nice touch, especially in the old days when you could get a stack of books from the shelves, get a coffee, and flip through books to your heart’s content. If these book stores could be profitable, I thought, maybe there was hope for humanity after all.

Soon these big book stores were everywhere: Barnes & Noble and Borders in the US, Chapters and Indigo in Canada (now merged, but with separate branding to create the fiction of competition), Waterstones in the UK, and others elsewhere. They invested massive amounts in real estate, getting huge commercial spaces in prime locations in major cities, and bigger spaces in the suburbs. They stocked their stores with a dizzying array of books.

Boon or Bust?

But things started to go a little sour early on. The first indication that the new book behemoths might be bad for the long-term health of the book ecosystem came quickly, when the little guys started going out of business. Economies of scale and and pricing clout meant that the big stores could charge less than their smaller competitors; and because of their size, their selection was always bigger. Following their in-store caffeine partners, Starbucks, they liked to choose their locations near existing successful independents. The little guys couldn’t compete, and went out of business, or got bought up, and absorbed into the book selling borg.

So now, there are precious few independent books stores left even in big cities.

The indie stores weren’t the only ones complaining. Because of the volume that goes through these stores, they could squeeze the publishers, on cost of books and return policies. They could charge for prime shelf-space. Small publishers found it harder to get the attention of the readers. But even the big publishers complained about the policies of these stores – and a little later, the other behemoth on the scene, Amazon.

Then there’s that odd feeling of being in a book store staffed by people who don’t know much about books. Any inquiry about a more obscure title more often than not ended up in front of a terminal. It seemed as if book stores, if their hiring policies were any indication, no longer cared much about books.

More: as time went on, it turned out that book sales weren’t really the most profitable kind of business these stores could do. Solution: reduce the shelf-space for books, increase the shelf-space for candles and trinkets. In Canada Chapters/Indigo has reduced book shelf-space from 75% to 60% (with Canadian fiction losing, and publishers cutting their lists in consequence). If the trend continues, books will be the minority in bookstores, and we might consider renaming them smelly candle stores that carry books.

The book business has stopped caring much about books.

Step One: Make Profit

These big stores are public companies, and big businesses. Like all businesses listed on stock exchanges, the people running them (boards of directors, and executives), have one central responsibility: to increase shareholder value.

The problem is that “shareholder value” has been defined almost exclusively as: “increased profits.” The owners of shares of Borders or any other large company don’t give a shit about books. They care about increased profits and increased share prices. The same is true in all businesses listed on stock exchanges. Mutual fund managers and institutional investors don’t buy stocks because of what a company does; they buy stock in companies whose stock prices will rise. And stock prices rise when profits go up.

But extracting profit is not necessarily related to long-term creation of value. In the book business (selling and publishing) what we’ve witnessed in the last couple of decades might be considered a stripping of true value, in order to deliver shareholder profit.

The “fault” does not lie with the big companies. They’re driven by a particular motive – profit. It’s built into the DNA of public companies, and the way stock exchanges work. There’s no use blaming them, might as well blame beavers for chewing through trees. But we should all remember that these companies are not driven by “value,” if you define value as healthy long-term prospects for readers and writers.

The state of the book publishing business is dire. Publishers are cutting back staff, editors are getting fired, or leaving. Amazon is putting the squeeze on everyone, and bookstores across the land are having a hard time, with major closures expected.

The Future?

So the rest of us, readers and writers and lovers of books, entrepreneurs and technologists, those of us really interested in the voracious appetite of the powerful and relatively affluent group, are going to have to come up with new and different ways to get books written, published and in the hands of readers.

Imagine: what would happen if every publisher in the world went out of business tomorrow? If every book store closed it’s doors?

Here’s what I think: I think we would see a flourishing of innovation and the kind of excitement the book business has not seen since the printing press was invented. These companies (sellers and publishers) aren’t all going to close their doors, but a good number might.

Lamentable? Maybe. Or maybe this is a fabulous opportunity for something new.

I’m optimistic. New technologies are coming along that change the economics of books: ebooks, ipods, print-on-demand, the web, and more to come yet. The readers are there, maybe fewer of them, but no less passionate. The writers are there. And let’s face it, if the doom and gloom in the business is right, whatever model these companies were using hasn’t worked all that well.

So it’s up to us — all of us who care about books — to figure out what the book business is going to look in the next decade or so.

Exciting times.

[cross-posted at the Book Oven Blog]

Bookkake, is “an entirely print-on-demand, and web-oriented, publisher,” launched by James Birdle. Either he’s a pervert, or a good marketer, but he’s starting with … well, let’s call them saucy books.

Interestingly his first batch of books are all old classics, and out of copyright, such as John Cleland’s 1748 porn classic Fanny Hill (which, incidentally, is available in audio at LibriVox, and I highly recommend hearing this one in audio as well as reading the original). Bookkake is launching with five titles: Fanny Hill, plus Liber Amoris by Wiliiam Hazlitt, Memoirs of a Young Rakehell by Guillaume Apollinaire, The Torture Garden by Octave Mirbeau, and Venus In Furs by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch.

I expect to see many more of these small indie publishers popping up (do you know any others?), and for all the worry about the publishing behemoths collapsing under their own weight, this is the future of interesting publishing, I have no doubt.

Says James:

The website, which is at the core of my approach, comes with extensive extracts, high-resolution covers, all the social media dooh-dahs and, most notably I think, entirely free ebook editions of every title.

Right on. Bookkake has a blog, where you can follow progress on the project.

Michael Geist has an article in the Toronto Star about Canadian book 2.0 projects. The two projects cited are Evan’s Wikitravel Press, and LibriVox.

About Wikitravel Press, says he:

For example, Wikitravel, one of the Internet’s most acclaimed travel websites, was launched in 2003 by Montreal residents Evan Prodromou and Michele Ann Jenkins. Using the same wiki collaborative technology that has proven so successful for Wikipedia, the Wikitravel site invited travelers to post their comments and experiences about places around the world in an effort to build a community-generated travel guide.

In less than five years, the site has accumulated more than 30,000 online travel guides in 18 languages, with more than 10,000 editorial contributions each week. The content is freely available under a Creative Commons licence that allows the public to use, copy or edit the guides.

Building on Wikitravel’s success, Prodromou and Jenkins recently established Wikitravel Press, which introduced its first two titles earlier this month. Wikitravel Press represents a new approach to travel book publishing based on Internet collaborative tools and print-on-demand technologies that should capture the attention of the industry for several reasons…

[there's more]
And on LibriVox:

Canadians are also playing a leading role in reshaping the creation of audiobooks. Hugh McGuire, a Montreal-based writer and Web developer, established LibriVox in August 2005. The site is also based on concept of Internet collaboration. In this instance, LibriVox volunteers create voice recordings of chapters of books that are in the public domain. The resulting audio files are posted back on to the Internet for free.

The LibriVox project, which does not have an annual budget, has succeeded in placing more than 1,200 audio books on the Internet, including Lucy Maud Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables, works from Mark Twain, William Shakespeare, Charles Dickens and hundreds more.

He finishes:

New technologies are rapidly reshaping the book industry and it is exciting to see how Canadians are quietly playing a leading role in the re-imagining of how books are created and distributed.

News from the commercial side of audiobooks, amazon dishes out 300 smackers for audible.com.

quick calculation:
-the article indicates that audible’s catalog is roughly 90,000 works
-@$300M for the kit, that’s about 3k/title
-so that makes librivox’s donation to the universe roughly worth (in grubby capitalist terms): 1200*3000 = $3.6 million.

let’s discount by 50% for our quirks, and, which puts us at $1.8 million, which sounds very low to me.

We’re adding about 70 books a month now to our catalog, so next year we should we “worth” twice that!

Not that we’re for sale (now or ever) but it’s … kinda interesting.

Montreal movers/shakers Ben and Fred have officially launched Standoutjobs Reception, with a little help from their friend Austin.

Here’s what it is:

The product is called RECEPTION. It’s a suite of web-based tools to power your online recruiting efforts. At its core you’ll find a do-it-yourself, interactive Career Site. The idea is to give companies the power to truly showcase their cultures and teams. Candidates want more information and interactivity from companies, and we hope to provide that. By allowing companies and candidates to build on-going relationships we make the process of hiring a more human one, which is ultimately, what it’s all about any way. Job descriptions and job requirements are nice (or not!) but what candidates really want is an inside view into your company – they want to know if it’s a good cultural and personal fit.

It’d be nice to be in a position to need to use the tools there, cause they look great, but we ain’t there yet.

Anyway, congrats on the launch.

I wrote a long piece partially about how newspapers might be able to save themselves, a while back.

Here’s another thought: advertising is where newspapers make their money, with local ads and classified making up a big percentage of the dough.

What if newspapers leveraged their existing ad networks, to build a localized advertising platform for local web sites and blogs. [Or if a company built such a system to sell to newspapers, to allow them to implement with little or no technical requirements, or just on their own... and finish off newspapers for good].

I’ve long thought that google adsense is a terrible tool for small websites – the ads are mostly irrelevant; the money insignificant unless you are getting thousands of visits a day.

But if there was a good way to get decent local ads on a more local blog, it would make more sense. Newspapers are well placed to provide that service to blogs.

Most local merchants are probably not savvy enough to recognize the need to be advertising online; so probably this service should be offered free to merchants to start; but with a year of statistics, a newspaper could much better quantify the value of such a proposition.

I wonder if the guys at Praized have thought of this business angle? Seems to me there’s a big space for someone to build a good online ad system for meatspace commerce.

All sorts of institutions are in big trouble because of the internet, and they’re scared as hell. Newspapers can’t figure out how they’ll keep making money; the music business is terrified that its business model is evaporating. Britannica has faded to irrelevance for anyone with an internet connection. I think that’s the tip of things, and anyone who has anything to do with information (schools, governments, book publishers, television, public broadcasters, among others) are all going to see their apple carts upset with fruit rolling all over the place in the next decade.

I’ve been thinking about this particularly in my role as President of the Board of Directors of the Atwater Library, where we are struggling (as many libraries do) to try to articulate why we are important, why we should get funding.

The big problem, I think, is that institutions tend to be wrong about what they are actually for.

That is, they have defined their existence by various functions they perform within a given ecosystem. In the context here, these institutions grew up in an ecosystem where information was scarce, and information distribution limited. The ecosystem has changed (info distribution & access is abundant), and institutions are having a hard time adapting. So: music labels think they sell CDs to people; newspapers think they get writers to make news articles, and get people to read them; libraries think they give people access to books and computers; universities think they provide a place for people to learn and do research; governments think they try to improve society by implementing policies wanted by the people … etc. But I think they are all wrong.

All those kinds of definitions get you tied up in the functional stuff you do, and they don’t really get to the core of what’s important, what the real thing is that you are doing. I don’t have answers, but any business/institution that thinks like this is going to get creamed in the next ten years, unless they take a look at what they are really for.

It seems to me the porn business, one of the most profitable businesses in the Universe, gets this in a way no one else does. Because the porn biz understands exactly what it is for:

Pornographers don’t sell pornography; they provide orgasms.

Looking at it that way, they don’t seem to care much about how they do it – they’ll just find ways to give people the orgasms however people want them given. Dirty postcards, magazines, prono theatres, VHS and Betamax, phone sex, online photos, online videos, chat lines, webcams, cybersex and God knows what else. You don’t hear the porn business whingeing about Intellectual Property and illegal downloads, and consumers as thieves, because they don’t have time: they’re too busy trying to give the world what it seems to want, more orgasms.

So, stepping out of the peepshow and back to the respectable world, why are newspapers, for instance, having such a hard time? I think it’s because they have a fundamental misunderstanding of what they do.

The value of a newspaper is not that it gives me information; the value of a newspaper is how it selects information – what it puts in and what it leaves out.

So: Newspapers are not for providing information; newspapers are for selecting what information I should get. (And maybe: for helping me make decisions? – not sure about that one).

And the problem is that newspapers, for the most part, are in a tizzy because they ask: how can we compete as information providers in a world where there is unlimited information available on the web? And the answer, I think, is that they should stop competing as information providers, and start focusing on their real skills and usefulness, which is information selection. Note, by the way, that this does not mean that newspapers should stop providing information, but rather that that task might necessary in order to do a good job of selecting information.

I keep coming back again and again to something I heard Joi Ito say a couple of years ago on some podcast or other:

mp3s are just metadata associated with a musician.

That’s pretty big, pretty heavy. I don’t think I quite have it fixed in my brain yet, but the idea is that a thing’s value is defined by how well people know it, and how highly they consider it. Mp3s are meta data that allow people to “find” an artist, and allow them to determine how much they value that artist. (What that means for the music biz I’m not sure, but we’ll find out in the next ten years).

For newspapers, you might say the same thing: news articles and columns are just metadata associated with the newspaper. But the real value a newspaper performs is not giving me good articles, it’s putting it all together. The mere provision of information is worthless now, because anyone can do it (even me).

This is why blogs – at least in the techno-intelligencia – win. Blogs are excellent selectors of information, while newspapers are pretty clunky at it – because for the past 300 years they existed in an ecosystem where information was scarce. Now information (and access to it) is abundant. So a site like BoingBoing becomes one of the most popular on the net: their craft is not providing information, it’s selecting it. And they’re good at it.

And given the huge overabundance of information on the web, we need all the help we can get in selecting. So newspapers need to work harder at providing that service, bringing that core skill (which they have always had – the Editor is the God of the newspaper) to bear on the web. Have a flip thru the Gazette, or, God help you, visit their web site, and is it any wonder they’re having a hard time? Half of it is the same generic wire-service information that’s in any other paper or news site on the web. That’s not giving me much value. It’s lazy selection and boring, and lazy and boring are a dime a dozen these days. So work harder at finding and selecting interesting content (from the web, there’s tons of it), take down you stupid registration system down, put up a decent navigable web site designed by someone who understands the Internet, and get on with things and stop whingeing.

This was the idea behind earideas: that what’s missing is not good audio out there, but a really good way to find and hear the good audio. (I hope we’re succeeding … anyone have any comments on earideas? Have you checked it out yet? Do you like it?).

There is lots of work to do, and I guess you and I and many other people will be busy for the next few years figuring this all out.

Oh, and any ideas about what a library is truly for? Some help would be much appreciated in deciding that – I’ve got some suggestions, but it hasn’t quite crystalized in the old brain yet.

UPDATE: Interesting proposition about wordpress and learning, that suggests a way education might start changing. [via blogsavvy; via bentrem twitter]

UPDATE II: Stemming from a debate about the value of political groups on Facebook, Mat’s started thinking about political platforms on the web.

I’ve been listening to tons of great public broadcasting on earideas.com.

And here’s a different view about why “good” public broadcasting is important: with the web, and podcasts, the CBC becomes a calling card for Canada. Ditto Deutsche-Welle for Germany and ARN for Australia etc. The broadcaster becomes a marketing tool and a builder of prestige. This is becoming more important in the networked world, where – for many of my peers, for instance – we can be anywhere in the world to do the work we do. Ditto businesses, scientists, writers and other “elites.” We want them here, in Canada, in Montreal, because really smart people make a country more vibrant and innovative.

I believe that a strong public broadcaster with excellent, thought-provoking content, helps build Canada’s image in the world.

While this isn’t all a public broadcaster should do, this is a new kind of rationale, I believe, brought on by the web; and one that might be more compelling to the business-only decision-making that runs our governments these days.

Note, this applies as well to universities: all universities should put a chunk of their marketing budget towards producing a weekly, high-quality podcast that interviews professors doing exciting research (whether in arts, humanities, or sciences and professional disciplines). I’m thinking of a weekly podcast with content as varied and wonderful as the TEDTalks. That is the gold standard for thought-provoking web content … and should be emulated by anyone who wants to build an image as a place of exciting innovation.

I was just talking with Mitch and Julien about this at lunch the other day; and commented on Mat’s blog to this effect.

David Byrne talks about music and business in a great article in Wired.

What is music?
First, a definition of terms. What is it we’re talking about here? What exactly is being bought and sold? In the past, music was something you heard and experienced — it was as much a social event as a purely musical one. Before recording technology existed, you could not separate music from its social context. Epic songs and ballads, troubadours, courtly entertainments, church music, shamanic chants, pub sing-alongs, ceremonial music, military music, dance music — it was pretty much all tied to specific social functions. It was communal and often utilitarian. You couldn’t take it home, copy it, sell it as a commodity (except as sheet music, but that’s not music), or even hear it again. Music was an experience, intimately married to your life. You could pay to hear music, but after you did, it was over, gone — a memory.

Technology changed all that in the 20th century. Music — or its recorded artifact, at least — became a product, a thing that could be bought, sold, traded, and replayed endlessly in any context. This upended the economics of music, but our human instincts remained intact. I spend plenty of time with buds in my ears listening to recorded music, but I still get out to stand in a crowd with an audience. I sing to myself, and, yes, I play an instrument (not always well).

We’ll always want to use music as part of our social fabric: to congregate at concerts and in bars, even if the sound sucks; to pass music from hand to hand (or via the Internet) as a form of social currency; to build temples where only “our kind of people” can hear music (opera houses and symphony halls); to want to know more about our favorite bards — their love lives, their clothes, their political beliefs. This betrays an eternal urge to have a larger context beyond a piece of plastic. One might say this urge is part of our genetic makeup.

All this is what we talk about when we talk about music.

[more...]

I’m just fiddling with Amazon ads for another web project soon to be launched (stay tuned). If you scroll down on the left-hand sidebar (on my homepage, here), you’ll see some amazon.com ads on this blog (they won’t last long). Here’s one too:

As I’ve been playing around, it occurs to me that a revolution in how we approach advertising is about to happen … maybe it’s already happened, I don’t know.

Traditionally, publishers (eg TV stations and Newspapers) courted advertisers to get their business. This meant that content producers worked for the advertisers – with all sorts of implications for what kind of content was allowed.

Now, it seems to me – on parts of the web at least – that advertisers will increasingly have to do the courting, and it’s the content-makers and publishers who will decide what sorts of things they want their content (writing, music, movies) to help sell.

Looking at the ads I just put up here, I have a list of 12 items – 2 gadgets (the sexy itouch I’m dreaming of, and a the mic set that helped me get LibriVox rolling), and 10 books, 3 of which were written by friends of mine (Umm, Regret the Error, and Abandon). The other 7 books are books I’ve read and enjoyed this year, and I would recommend them to anyone.

It costs me nothing to put these ads up. And I am happy to help sell these things which I believe in (though as mentioned, I will soon take the ads down – I don’t want to have a commercial relationship with you here; though I have a couple of explicitly commercial projects where I am/will be putting ads).

In effect, here I am really just recommending to you some books that I really loved this year, and that I think you ought to read, and giving you a mechanism to buy them – and support the authors. While Amazon gets their cut, I don’t care about Amazon, but I do think that these writers should be supported and rewarded so that they will write more wonderful books. Few people read this blog, but if I had a big readership and wanted to put ads up here, I would have to work to put ads here for products that will really sell to my audience. That is, ads for things I think my audience will want.

Now it turns out the only things I can think of to tell you to buy at the moment are books, and a couple of gadgets. If I put my mind to it I could come up with any number of things I think you should spend your money on (maybe some good Scotch, for instance). But I would refuse to sell you things I don’t believe in – things I don’t think you want or need.

In the old model: a publisher (say, NBC TV) tries to convince the advertiser (say, Kraft Dinner) that his audience will buy the product, so that the advertiser will give him money to show Kraft ads on NBC TV.

In the new model: the publisher (me) has to try to figure out what kind of products the audience (you) actually wants, and then advertise them.

Further: the old model was pretty inexact, I convince you to give me money to advertise your product, and no on knows really what the effect is.

New model: I decide what I sell, and I see if it’s selling well or not – which I can tell by clickthrus etc. If it is, I keep advertising it; if it’s not, I’ll start advertising something else.

That’s a pretty significant difference.

Now it so happens that Amazon is the de facto commercial mall these days – but they are just the middle man, and I think their stranglehold on this space might be … well … getting commodified. The value of Amazon as online seller will decrease in coming years, I think, even if their volume increases. In part, maybe for the reasons above: if I am going to sell things, I’d like to sell things I like, and Amazon *has* to carry them if they want my business… because otherwise there is a good business figuring out how to help me sell those things. A business that is overdue I think.

We are in the netherland right now, between states. We haven’t got to the kind of advertising market I’m thinking of. Now, more or less, the Google model says: we’ll read your stuff, and serve ads I think are relevant. Which they almost never are. (For instance, I have Amazon on one of my test sites, and it keeps trying to sell an mp3 download of “Walking on Sunshine” by Katrina & the Waves … wtf?)

Adbrite and similar services say: tell me what your site is, and we’ll try to find advertisers who want to advertise there.

But as publisher, what I want is a good advertising clearinghouse so that *I* can find the ads *I* want to have near the stuff *I* am publishing, ads I think *my* audience will respond to. And all I ask in return is a cut of the sales you make from people I send your way.

Again, I think there is a big business opportunity here to make such a clearinghouse. Or maybe someone is doing this already.