Howard Rheingold, an authoritative figure on the study of social, political and cultural implications of technologies, launched a videoblog.

As written in Smart Mobs:

I’ve launched a video blog at http://vlog.rheingold.com and plan/hope to update it weekly. Spread the word! It all started when I started thinking about updating A Slice of Life in My Virtual Community, which I wrote twenty years ago. It didn’t take long to realize that a description of how I spend my time online these days would be conveyed more effectively via video/screencast than plain text. Once I got rolling, I realized that it would take more than one episode to show how and why I spend time reading RSS, scanning blogs, blogging, gardening wikis, posting in virtual communities, Twittering, teaching, etc. So the first month or so will feature episodes of A (re)Slice of Life Online. However, once I started including my indoor and outdoor offices in the videos, it occurred to me that I ought to explain something about the parts of my life that haven’t been so visible to my readers — the painting, gardening, sculpting that are as important to me as the publishing activities that are most visible to others.

Howard Rheingold summarizes in 4.31 minutes the development of digital media and introduces the concept of participatory media and their 3 distinct characteristics:

• many to many distribution
• evolution in social media
• development of social networks

Stay tuned for more video podcasts of the author, where “he reslices his life online.”

Yes, the music industry is evolving. And this time, numbers are not the ones talking, its in the news.

• Motorola acquires online music store SoundBuzz
• Sony BMW confirms DRM free music, but will force customers to visit a store to buy it I agree with TechCrunch on this one.
  

  Sony BMG will become the last of the big four record companies to sell DRM free music, but with one very stupid catch.

• Napster to offer DRM-free mp3 downloads

Trent Reznor posted the other day the sales results of the label-less album of Saul Williams he produced, “The Inevitable Rise and Liberation of NiggyTardust”. He wrote:

Saul’s previous record was released in 2004 and has sold 33,897 copies.

As of 1/2/08,
154,449 people chose to download Saul’s new record.
28,322 of those people chose to pay $5 for it, meaning:
18.3% chose to pay.

Of those paying,

3220 chose 192kbps MP3
19,764 chose 320kbps MP3
5338 chose FLAC

Keep in mind not one cent was spent on marketing this record. The only marketing was Saul and myself talking as loudly as we could to anybody that would listen.

Before discussing what other bloggers have said about the subject, lets take a look at the numbers.

The facts of the industry

First some facts:

• The average cd price of the time was 14,92$ (according to RIAA; pdf file here)

• more RIAA numbers (a *pdf file again). Between 1996 and 2006 we have an increase of concert ticket prices of 86%, while cd prices fall only 9%.

• and according to musicBizAcademy
  

  A new act usually gets somewhere between 10-15% of the suggested list price of a recording. (Remember too that out of your percentage, you must pay your producer their percentage, for producing your record.)

What do the numbers say?

• 2007: 28,322 people payed 5$ for the album, this means a profit of 141,610$ (remember the album is label-less; I suppose out of that profit, the artist has to pay the producer too).

• 2004: Saul’s previous record sold 33.897 copies. This means a profit of 505,743.24$ (the album distributed by Fader Label). Out of the se505,743.24$, Saul receives 15% (lets suppose 15% according to the information of MusicBizAcademy; probably more, since he wasn’t a new act – but lets say 15% without counting the payment to the producer), which equals for the artist to a profit of 75,861.476$.

So lets compare the numbers: without a label, Saul Williams earned 141,610$ and with a label 75,861.476$.

These numbers are more or less hypothetical (especially the 2004 numbers), but you get my point. Correct me if you find anything strange.
This means, that Saul – supposedly – had a pretty good profit from his independent debut, while also gaining considerable amounts from his concerts (don’t disregard that Saul’s independency and collaboration with Trent Reznor has also increased his popularity; and of course the price increase of concert tickets).

The blogosphere’s points

• Mashable, commenting on Trent Reznor’s disappointment wrote:

First of all, Saul Williams isn’t exactly a name brand. For someone with one other album having been produced before this one, I personally would be thrilled with the distribution they received on word-of-mouth.

I agree, Saul Williams isn’t a brand name. But I think Reznor is disappointed from the pure numbers; 18,3% willing to pay just 5$ seems disappointing indeed. Especially, when you think that you are actually encouraging the beginning of an artist

• If we consider that the sole marketing used, was just word-of-mouth and Reznors fans, I would agree with Andrew Baron that 18% is a pretty good percentage. Lets not forget that
  

  culture has shifted from following the crowd up to the top of the charts to finding your own style and exploring far out beyond the broadcast mainstream, into both relative obscurity and back through time to the classics

  as Chris Anderson notes in the Long Tail.

• One more interesting point is that Saul Williams, reached a wider public. 33,897 people listened to him in 2004 (officially) and 154,449 in 2007 (still officially). That’s a growth of almost 450% in just 3 years. That’s big (and without marketing!)

I don’t know if you have followed the creative force of Trent Reznor. But if he wants to market a product, he has fascinating ways to do it (remember the Year Zero Project?)

• Finally, as Marshall Kirkpatrick notes, we still don’t know how the concerts of the artist went. Do we have a similar increase? If so, I would say, Saul’s experiment was a huge success.

Conclusion

It seems to me that the independence of the artists from the (at least big) labels is on the way. We still have to wait for the results of Radiohead and Madonna to see the subject (a bit) more spherically, but the numbers about S. William’s album speak for the transformation of the traditional music industry. Recent news are giving us a hint. Philips joins forces with Rhapsody and labels in general are looking for new options.

Update:

Some thoughts on the Radionhead album are out. Noone knows the profits for sure, but the whole concept looks like a combination of traditional and modern promoting. In a way like the Reznor-Williams experiment, but in a more secure way.

Radiohead used word-of-mouth to get the attention of the public (which is certainly online) and then went ‘traditional’ (removing the internet download version and moving to the ‘physical’ stores).

Lets wait for the numbers, to get some more conclusive results.

A recent post in digital media world called ‘Facebored‘ pointed out that Facebook starts getting kind of boring. Not because it doesn’t update its applications or services, but simply because its bubble has now burst. I’ve heard of Facebook for quite some time but really didn’t feel the need to join the community. Now that I did - mostly out of curiosity - I can really associate with the digital media post.

The -in a sense- sudden growth of the Twitter community makes me feel the same. I don’t see the need to join twitter; let me explain why:

1. Sometimes, I enjoy being alone. (with my mobile turned off)
2. It’s addictive.
3. We have enough connectivity, thank you.
4. Like ‘Nobody’ said in the Jim Jarmusch film Dead Man: “you talk too much and say nothing”
5. Too many people know too much about each other (already)
6. Sometimes, it seems like spam.
7. “Having a blast with my nephews”, “enjoying paris by night”, “changing my ringtone”. *precious*
8. information and knowledge in 140 characters just doesn’t feel right.
9. it’s a marketing tool. (hurrae! more advertising)
10. it’s an ego distillery.
11. many headlines and no news.
12. inspite of its affinity to mobile technology, it remains a web application.

and by the way, why do you like mobile phones?

Nearly 10,000 U.S. adults were asked in a survey: How likely would you be to implant a device into your brain that enabled you to use your mind to access the internet if it could be done safely? 11% of the responses were prone to accepting such a perspective.

Marshall Kirkpatrick expressed today his opposition to the idea of an “internet brain implant“.

I find the notion of a web chip (a chip in general actually) oblique as it is; but it also makes me think. The points, that Marshall highlights are well argumented, but I believe we are already addicted to technology in a very high degree. I talk about a degree, where technology (the web, mobile phones, ipods, whatever) are already implanted to our (at least mental) existence. We can’t step out of our front door without our mobile phones and we can’t pass couple of days without checking our emails (I don’t know about you, but without internet I feel physically weak). The notion of media as extensions of ourselves (expressed by McLuhan) is becoming more realistic every day. Let me elaborate.

• Privacy. Marshall Kirkpatrick sees the idea of ‘privacy as an illusion’ nowadays as a hyperbole. I disagree. Anyone can easily ‘google’ your name and find information about you. Your habits online are open for anyone to see. And even without google, we have blogs, facebook, myspace and hundreds more communities which in one way or another define us. But also the mobile culture, leaves little room to privacy. We are reachable everywhere and anytime. Just call. And have you noticed someting else? When someone calls us on the mobile phone, his first question is: Where are you? Privacy has a completely new meaning nowadays.
• Information overload. We are facing a paradox. On the one hand people complain about the information overload. On the other hand though, this overload has enabled a democratizition of media, given the public an incomparable variety of choices and encouraged a whole economics about the long trail of the web. We are standing between a paradise of choice and a paradox of choice. Maybe our hands are too slow to get to all this information (as Marshall Kirkpatrick says). But only because they just receive instructions from our brain, bacause they are mediators. So maybe it would be better if we would let our brain do the work. Forget mediators.

Services like twitter show that maybe people don’t want “…a private place to hatch [their] plots”. They don’t even care for the information overload. Maybe they just need to be constantly occupied, to be in constant socialization. Information like “I’m waiting for my roommate to wake up, so that we can clean up the house” or “just put the kids to bed. ready for bed myself” REALLY make me think.

If I were to summarize my argument it would be: We are already addicted to some media and use them so often, as if they were an implant in our heads. Under that perspective, I don’t see the difference.

I suppose such an internet chip, could make many popular technologies obsolete. Who would need a mobile phone, an ipod or a laptop? You got it all in your head. When you want to be alone (if ever) just state ‘out for lunch’ or ‘brb’ or even ‘offline’.

And you can cheat on exams, just wiki everything. If you dare to trust wikipedia.

Boring meeting? Play World of Warcraft.

Boring sex life? Let your ‘imagination’ free.

After all its all in your head.

And if you are skeptical about the big vendors controlling your brain chip, install linux.

I just discovered a very interesting post through a blogoscope entry about Google Knol. It is located in Anil Dash’s blog and is called ‘Google and the theory of mind‘.

He gives some examples, why google is not aware of what others are aware. One of these examples is the google Knol announcement almost a week ago.

What really drew my attenion is, that allthough the Knol announcement clarifies that the content will also be available to other search engines, Anil Dash notes that Knol will be hosted and indexed by google.

“This presents inherent conflicts in the ranking of content, as well as disincentives for content creators to control the environment in which their content is published. This necessarily disadvantages competing search engines, but more importantly eliminates the ability for content creators to innovate in the area of content presentation or enhancement.”

A very well-argumented post, which surely puts the subject under a new perspective. Take a look at it.

Update [22.12.07]: Masternewnmedia posted today a great article on the subject. Google Knol and wikipedia: Risks, opportunities, challenges

I am wondering if google and its search engine are actually important for the blogosphere. I believe, that bloggers have lots of options to locate other blogs (technorati, feedster, etc) and google is not the only solution.

Under that perspective, I completely agree with the post in the blog herald about the google game.
Google is not the only game in town, and even if it were, blog entries should be targeted to the readers.

Nonetheless, getting acquainted with google’s pageranking system can certainly help understanding how the network works. Apart from that, I suppose that other search engines, rank sites more or less on the same principles.

So here are a couple of links, which explain google’s pagerank algorithm. One here and one here. Both posts are very detailed and surely explain a lot (although concentration is needed).

As the post in the blog herald suggests, I have my doubts if the algorithm is completely decoded, but still both posts are extremely thorough.