acidlabs

Digital music and digital rights management has been a bone of contention for several years now. The music labels continually cry foul as they allege that illegal music downloads are doing them irreparable harm while well-founded research seems to indicate the opposite.

My personal opinion is that DRM, as envisaged by the labels and generally executed is broken - it stops me getting access to the music I want to listen to in the way I want. It’s either restricted in place for listening (CD, limited number of computers, etc.) or restricted in format (tried getting iTunes bought music out of iTunes and onto a non-iTunes friendly device? Doable, but not for amateurs).

Now, a couple of enterprising Aussies, Jared Madden and Adam Purcell have put together tune-out.com as a response to the wailing of the labels and in particular to the industry-funded film, Australian Music In Tune, that is being pushed as educational and which the industry wants used in schools as a part of courses on media and copyright.

There’s even a fairly high profile story about Frenzal Rhomb’s Lindsay McDougall being duped into appearing in the film on the understanding that it was about the struggle to make it as a musician in Australia. There’s no apparent response from the music industry at this point, but if the McDougall story is accurate, the music industry types continue to play unfair and fast and loose with the truth in order to push their ever less believable message.

Not cool.

Tune Out’s raison d’être is on their home page and states in part:

There is no digital music battle or piracy war. That is a figment of your imagination, and, every time you preach our digital crimes to us, we ‘tune out’ of your deranged ranting. Your declining profits are the symptom of a business model that is fast becoming irrelevant.

You want us to pay? We want you to pay attention.

Damn straight! I’ve signed their statement and message to the labels. If you’re interested, I suggest you do to.

Sydney-based journo and commenter on all things digital, Stilgherrian, has more detail.

Watching Clay Shirky’s Web 2.0 talk, and rewatching the Supernova talk has me all keyed up for my talk at Interesting South (more up-to-date Facebook page here) on the evening of 12 May at the Belvoir Street Theatre in Sydney. I’m speaking on the subject Conversation, Collaboration, Community. I only hope I can be as interesting as Clay.

If you’re interested in coming along to Interesting South, tickets are just $35 and can be purchased through Eventbrite.

It’s a small thing, but another of my photos has been chosen for inclusion in a Schmap travel guide.

This time, it’s the guide for Australia (link to my pic and page), and the photo they’ve used is for Floriade, an internationally recognised Spring flower festival held in my town, Canberra every September.

Like a lot of other folks, I’m really excited and inspired by Clay Shirky’s Web 2.0 Expo talk (video here). As usual for Clay, it’s engaging, informed, informative and has you thinking “what if” just moments in. And as usual, it’s full of great quotes like:

Desperate Housewives essentially functioned as a kind of cognitive heat sink, dissipating thinking that might otherwise have built up and caused society to overheat.

Gold. And he does it every time he speaks.

I still chuckle every time I recall his talk at Supernova 2007 on changing the dynamics of business and his great line when discussing open source support with AT&T:

It was if we said we get our Thursdays from a banana.

If you’re still watching hours of television each week rather than engaging in participatory culture, I’d suggest you’re wasting valuable time. As Clay mentions in the talk, without a mouse, the screen really is broken - it would seem that “from the mouths of babes” is really very true. That’s not to say a few hours a week in front of the TV just vegging out doesn’t have value, but you should definitely be out there doing something, engaging in something and adding value to something. It doesn’t matter what it is.

My local online compadres, Laurel Papworth and Nic Hodges have also commented on the talk.

Earlier this week, social media guru, Chris Brogan blogged about an incident where some old-school marketing was applied to him - a faceless press release from someone he didn’t know, an embargo he could care less about and no attempt to get to know him. This form of marketing - all push and no relationship - just doesn’t work in the new world of engagement with your market and its consumers (or prosumers, ideally).

I’m certainly not anything like as high-profile as Chris, but I’d like to talk about a company that’s reached out to me to take a look at their product and done it the right way. That company is DocStoc. I’ve got no financial or other interest in them, so I get nothing from mentioning them here, I just want to, as they’ve done the exact opposite of Tom in Chris’ tale.

A couple of weeks back, out of the blue, I received an email from DocStoc’s Community Manager, Kathrien Ahn. Kathrien had read my blog (she had an informed view of it, demonstrating so), thought I might be interested in DocStoc’s work, described briefly what DocStoc did and offered to set up a conversation between me and DocStoc’s CEO, Jason Nazar so we could talk about their work.

Jason and I ended up talking for about 30 minutes. We chatted about their product, which is kind of like Slideshare (one of my favorite tools) but for all sorts of documents. They’re building a community that’s sharing all sorts of documents in a variety of forms - legal templates, e-books, educational and creative material, business tools. It’s actually a pretty clever idea. We also talked about their funding - they’ve just taken a Series B from Rustic Canyon - and are planning for some growth.

I would probably not have noticed DocStoc if Kathrien hadn’t approached me. I certainly wouldn’t have paid attention if the approach had sounded like they were selling me something. But, you know, they did this the right way - they approached me, spent a little time building a relationship and put me in touch with senior people, despite the fact that I’m a pretty minor player in the social media world.

If DocStoc’s ideas sound interesting to you, I’d take a look, even if only because they have their heads around the social part of what they are up to.