The panel at Digital Citizens: Ben Shepherd – Sound Alliance; Sam Buckingham – singer / songwriter; Gareth Stuckey – Director, Gigpiglet; Dan Rosen – ARIA Chief Executive Officer; Neil Ackland – Sound Alliance; moderated by@acatinatree. The event was held at FBI Social.
So the topic of the evening was meant to be Social media and the music industry but that’s not quite what we got.
Everyone talked about the revenue/rights quandary but there was no real talk of how they were strategising for the digital age. Except for Sam Buckingham, a singer songwriter who has leveraged social media to connect to her fan base, build a loyal following and even crowd sourced $11,000 via the Pozible platform to fund her first album.
Having worked for a company behind open source software, I know how important community conduct is, on forums and other channels. In fact it was something that Geoff, as FarCry product evangelist had to (and I’m sure still does) moderate closely. This interaction between products and users is vital in fostering closer relationships between companies and customers, feature improvements and product innovation.
So it is great to see Get Satisfaction create a campaign around this. Get Satisfaction is a service that allows customers to send feedback, bugs and feature requests to companies. They have created a campaign called the Company Customer Pact. An accord, or code of conduct if you will. As interactions between companies and customers get closer through social media it will become more and more important that people are on the same page. Check it out, and get on board.
http://www.ccpact.com/
Tom Switzer addresses the audience at the Sydney Institute
While I found myself agreeing in small parts to the speakers at last week’s Sydney Institute, I could not agree with the pessimistic views on politics on the web. The Sydney Institute is a forum for discussion on politics and current affairs. Despite it’s decidedly conservative leanings efforts are usually made to present a somewhat balanced debate when a panel format is employed. Except in the case of last week’s selection of speakers.
Shelley Gare, a freelance editor and writer mourned her loss of editorial clout because now anyone can publish. Tom Switzer from The Spectator was rallying against the vitriolic comments on the blogosphere. Bernard Keane from Crikey was left to defend “the internet” which he did by unnerving the older audience with an argument that seemed to award credit for democracy but debits for insularity and fragmentation of debate once held by mainstream media.
I always have an eye out for articles that comment on the effects of the internet age on the world. I was pointed to this thoughtful video of Canadian author Margaret Atwood speaking at an O’Reilly conference on the future of books in the e-age. She gives a historical perspective on the publishing industry as well as some interesting examples of self publishing.
Atwood asks:
- are books dying?
- if all books go on the internet will all books be free?
But she really makes the point that the author as a “primary resource” must be sustained. Which is worrying, because apparently authors make less out of e-book sales than they do out of paper books. Atwood then highlights the United Artists response to the film industry (an artist collective) as a potential response for willing self-organising authors against a publishing industry that is seemingly doing less and less to support those it represents, while requiring more of them.
The use of Facebook, Twitter and Youtube in the uprising of ordinary citizens in Egypt is a fascinating example of the role the internet is playing to rally sentiment and organise individuals into a powerful force for political change. But examples of the internet inhibiting change are evident within the context of the Australian media landscape and political reform agenda, argues George Megalogenis.
First, to Egypt:
Within five days of his death, an anonymous human rights activist created a Facebook page — We Are All Khaled Said— that posted cellphone photos from the morgue of his battered and bloodied face, the video of the corrupt police officers and other YouTube videos contrasting his corpse with pictures of his bright and smiling face from happier days. By mid-June, 130,000 people joined the page to get and share updates about the case.
Stephen Page is the head of publishing house Faber and Faber. He was interviewed by Monica Attard on Radio National for Sunday Profile last week. This post summarises the interview.
The central question was how will publishing respond to e-books? Will it like newspapers loose market share? Will it struggle to find its feet in a new digital distribution mechanism like music? Page thinks that publishing, will learn from the experiences of the movie and music industries. He did not see e-books threatening publishing in the same way that the internet has threatened newspapers. Newspapers are a medium that deliver information quickly, which is something that the internet as a medium does better. But the physical book, Page argues, has an inherent advantage. A book has an aesthetic quality that cannot be compared to the experience of an e-book. People “furnish their house with them”, but people cannot fetishise an e-book. People do fetishise Apple products though. Page referred to the iPad as “a machine trying to do many things” but not a device suitable for the experience of reading a long narrative. The Kindle however, with its e-ink technology solves the problem of eye strain caused by luminous screens. Its devices like the Kindle that are more likely to grow the small channel of the e-book and offer another route to readers.
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